There’s something about waking up at 3am every morning that just gives you that extra bit of time to blog. Today we’re touching on what happened to my GeoCities Archive. A while back I had an idea to dockerise my Apache-based web server.
There wasn’t much point in having a dedicated piece of hardware when I could just use Docker Desktop on one of my other computers. I began to put pen to paper in early September. I could merge a better version of the GeoCities Archive, make it use a Mac OS native filesystem such as APFS.
I rsycned my data with a little help from Jon and it was all looking good. Until I realised how much smut and gore was in the archive. What’s interesting is most of it appears to be after Yahoo’s purchase of GeoCities.
This posed a very big problem for me. While Cloudflare’s CSAM implementation helped, it couldn’t help me purge any user content that would have violated the original terms of service (ToS).
Sure, I could manually search for pornography and gore based on filename but I was finding that only had a discovery rate of 5-10%. Plus I had to look at these sites to assess whether they were worth keeping.
In most cases, they were not worth keeping and I made the decision to pull the plug. Only a few days ago, I reverted back to the Raspberry Pi setup without the GeoCities Archive. I also trimmed away Sci-Fi and Assembler Games. If I remove GeoCities, I can also remove the blade hard drive from the web server.
The good news? Any violations of the original ToS for GeoCities has been reported to archive.org to purge. I just hope they do actually purge all the questionable content I had to sift through. It was nice knowing you GeoCities, but perhaps you are best left in the past – in our memories. 🥲
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