Thinking about Fan History
Aug. 19th, 2016 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2b3NzBP:
marthawells:
I was thinking about problems in fandom that people now don’t have to deal with anymore, and how much this one used to take up my time.
In the earlier days of online fandom (like around the late 90s, early 2000s) a lot of web hosting companies offered free web sites, but they were only free up to a point. If the site got too much traffic, you had to pay for bandwidth. (That’s the activity on the server caused by people hitting the pages of the site, viewing images and so on.) Fan sites tended to be image heavy because the owners scanned in photos, made graphics, and also had long HTML files with stories, episode guides, and so on.
If a free site got too much traffic and hit the maximum badnwidth allowance set by the hosting company, the site owner could end up getting charged for it, or having the site shut down with no notice, or both. (The assumption on the hosting company’s part is that a site with a lot of traffic is making money and needs to pay fees, though of course a fan site is not making any money and the owner may not be able to pay that sudden $200.00 bill to keep their popular site up.)
But there was a way to steal bandwidth. Instead of storing images on your own site, you could link to the image on another site in an img tag, so the image would appear on your page, but would be stored on the other site, and that site would take the bandwidth hit. So you had site owners who were basically having their site shut down or being handed bills for traffic on someone else’s site. You can’t really call it plagiarism, it was more like parasitism.
And web site parasites were really good at pretending they didn’t understand what they were doing was wrong and actually costing other people money. (Often with a smiley face!) (This was also the time when fannish entitlement was a big issue and running a fanfic archive meant you’d get demanding emails from people who wanted you to update every day and supply exactly the kind of stories they wanted, and they would get increasingly abusive, but that’s another post.)
And a lot of fan site owners had no access to tools to stop it happening and didn’t know what to do about it. And even if you did know how to block or redirect the links, it was still a pain in the ass.
This problem was really bad in the Hercules and Xena fandom, because the stupid awful marketing company selling the video tapes (which was also famous for scary and abusive phone sales tactics) would encourage people to set up a fan web site, and the easiest way to do it was to parasite someone else’s site, link to all their images and sometimes copy their original material (stories, episode guides, meta, etc) and just forget to put their name on it.
Anyway, I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it anymore and I’m glad you guys don’t either.
marthawells:
I was thinking about problems in fandom that people now don’t have to deal with anymore, and how much this one used to take up my time.
In the earlier days of online fandom (like around the late 90s, early 2000s) a lot of web hosting companies offered free web sites, but they were only free up to a point. If the site got too much traffic, you had to pay for bandwidth. (That’s the activity on the server caused by people hitting the pages of the site, viewing images and so on.) Fan sites tended to be image heavy because the owners scanned in photos, made graphics, and also had long HTML files with stories, episode guides, and so on.
If a free site got too much traffic and hit the maximum badnwidth allowance set by the hosting company, the site owner could end up getting charged for it, or having the site shut down with no notice, or both. (The assumption on the hosting company’s part is that a site with a lot of traffic is making money and needs to pay fees, though of course a fan site is not making any money and the owner may not be able to pay that sudden $200.00 bill to keep their popular site up.)
But there was a way to steal bandwidth. Instead of storing images on your own site, you could link to the image on another site in an img tag, so the image would appear on your page, but would be stored on the other site, and that site would take the bandwidth hit. So you had site owners who were basically having their site shut down or being handed bills for traffic on someone else’s site. You can’t really call it plagiarism, it was more like parasitism.
And web site parasites were really good at pretending they didn’t understand what they were doing was wrong and actually costing other people money. (Often with a smiley face!) (This was also the time when fannish entitlement was a big issue and running a fanfic archive meant you’d get demanding emails from people who wanted you to update every day and supply exactly the kind of stories they wanted, and they would get increasingly abusive, but that’s another post.)
And a lot of fan site owners had no access to tools to stop it happening and didn’t know what to do about it. And even if you did know how to block or redirect the links, it was still a pain in the ass.
This problem was really bad in the Hercules and Xena fandom, because the stupid awful marketing company selling the video tapes (which was also famous for scary and abusive phone sales tactics) would encourage people to set up a fan web site, and the easiest way to do it was to parasite someone else’s site, link to all their images and sometimes copy their original material (stories, episode guides, meta, etc) and just forget to put their name on it.
Anyway, I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it anymore and I’m glad you guys don’t either.
no subject
Date: 2016-08-22 06:41 am (UTC)