Geocities.ws Forums

[Fabian]

Hello there,
I think our "About Us" http://geocities.ws/about.php section is appropriate for my first post in our forums as it pretty much gives a good explanation of why we are doing this and what we are willing to achieve.

GeoCities is dead ... everybody knows that.

You know the story ... we all do : On late 2009 Yahoo! Inc. announced that the popular free hosting service Yahoo! GeoCities was closing down. After October 26th 2009, all our GeoCities files were going be deleted as the company decided not to provide free hosting services any more.

We don't know if the same happened to you but, when we heard the news that Yahoo! was closing GeoCities down we were overwhelmed by a sense of sadness and loss; it was like, by doing this, they were taking away a big part of the History of the Internet with them, our history, your history.

Like many others, we felt like it was not enough for us to back up our sites and run them somewhere else. Our sites were not just our sites, they were part and they made us part of an idea, they made us part of a community. We had to preserve as much of our community as we possible could, we had to preserve GeoCities !

There are many internet archives out there. They are like photo albums which show you the image of what it once was, but nothing more. Preserving a community involves much more than just providing the public with a set of snapshots of dead web pages, it means allowing the community to express, to interact, to change, to evolve ... this is far beyond what a simple snapshot can do.

So, days passed by and we kept on wondering whether it was possible or not and how hard and expensive could it be. But if we were going to do something, we had to act fast, or it would be too late for us to do anything at all. So finally, one glorious night a decision was made and an action plan was written ... on a bar napkin : we were going to take the challenge, we were going to be part of the history of the Internet, we were going to save GeoCities !

This site was born as a result of our desire to save as much of our original community as we possibly could and to expand it beyond it's original limits and barriers. To promote the community and it's grow, we will be progressively providing you with as many tools, means, knowledge and support as we possible can but we really cannot do this alone; you are part of this large community now and as a member of such, you are responsible for it, for it's health and growth. Develop your site, expand your limits, talk to others, get involved, ask for help, a whole community is there for you, know that we count on you.

So now that you know how it began, it is time for you to tell us how it's going to continue, so tell us please ...

... is GeoCities really dead ?


Hope you share our vision and enthusiasm
Sincerely, Fabian.

[Popoids]

Hi, Fabian, and everyone.

First of all, THANK YOU for saving me. Heehee, turns out my backup of the original site I had in GC was way less than perfect. I thought my website was lost forever... and along comes GC Two. GC Plus? oh, ok, GC.ws at least

Can I offer a suggestion here?

The original Geocities, before the Yahoo takeover, was an actual, thriving community, with community leaders and organizations that worked to keep their neighbourhoods clean, help their neighbours in all sort of ways, and meet and keep in touch with each other.
I don't know how many people here remember those times, but think about it: Groups and communities, guestbooks (or "walls") where you could talk back to people's pages, chats, there were games and contests organized by us, the neighbours - a community/social networking site conceived years (ages!) before Facebook and others came along. Rudimentary back then, true, but if it hadn't been for Yahoo that killed that concept, by immediately dismissing leaders, organizations and groups, it could have been the first and largest social network ever. All done by us, the neighbours and the simple tools, but great attitude and concept of the true community of GC.
No, I have no love for Yahoo as you can see. First, they took away all the community feeling (and core value) out of GeoCities, then they killed it altogether because their twisted idea of it did not work...

So this is my suggestion: let's try to rescue the original GC, the friendly, interactive, groundbreaking and altogether awesome real Geocities.

I'll help

[Fabian]

Dear Popoids :

We're sorry we haven´t answer your post before, the truth is that we wanted to take some time to do it right and we´ve been really busy (soon you´ll all find out why

I remember Geocities and when I do it I don´t know how to feel. I have happy memories from those times but I also remember what happened later which finally ended up in having Yahoo! closing geocities down .

As you know our intention is to preserve the community, and know that we are working as hard as we can to do that. Of course, having limited resources as we have, we have always had to prioritize things. Our first priority was to have as much of what we saved from Geocities online as soon as possible, later we decided it was important to provide you all means to communicate with us and with each other so we created the forums, then we decided it was important to give you the possibility to allow your sites to evolve and change, so we introduced the File Manager, then we decided that, in order for the community to grow, we had to provide the people the opportunity to host new sites with us so we offered free web hosting to everybody.

The future looks exciting, we have many many ideas and we get very excited every time a member of this community shares his ideas with the rest of us as you did. As we progress and provide you all more and more functionality and tools we will be evaluating and prioritizing each of the ideas (both yours and ours) and will implement them as we can, for some of them we might as well need some help. Control Panel, statistics, your own forums, guestbook, other tools, etc etc etc are all in our plans and will be here eventually, for some of them like for example yours, some help might be needed and we are glad there people like you, willing to help

We really think this MUST be a community, a team, where everybody is heard, we are here just to analyze, evaluate and implement what we all thing is the best for everyone, and every action we take or don´t take is based on this and is restricted only by this analysis and the resources we have to implement it, nothing more, nothing less.

Thank you very very much for your post !!!

[Dimma]

I would also like to say THANK YOU :D

I actually got into GeoCities first after Yahoo acquired it, but it was really nice to have a small website that people I met on forums could visit if they liked what I wrote. It was a good feeling to see in the stats that some people read it.

[geocities.ws]

Hi,

Thank you , internet has changed a lot since those first times, it was like being in a small town while now it feels more like a big huge city with all its good things and bad things. I am happy I am old enough to have known the old internet

Thanks.

[Econtillodo]

cool story bro

[kuyagreg]

Thank you so much for saving my site!!!!! I'll be back.