I signed up for a free website with Geocities in 1997 and shortly thereafter discovered and became part of the Community Leader program. We made websites and "patrolled" our local "communities" for good and bad content. Award programs, forums, and lots of friends were made. Geocities even thanked us Community Leaders by giving us a distribution of stock when they went public, expanding the available disk space in our homepages, and sent us t-shirts.

In 1999, Yahoo! bought Geocities, dismantled the group of volunteer Community Leaders, and buried the whole concept of communities of neighborhoods and blocks that made Geocities so unique.

I moved off to college and left most of what I knew about the old Geocities behind, but I did occasionally reference the webpages I created over the years, even still today. When I asked out the girl who is now my wife, I created a HTML file about it on my Geocities site, which is now gone. I even had someone at my new job find my Geocities site through Google about 2 weeks ago when they were searching for some information I had published there.

Tonight, I decided to finally upgrade to the premium service for Geocities to get FTP access to my files. I've been reluctant to do it for years, but gave it a whirl anyway. As soon as I submitted the upgrade order, all my Geocities site was deleted. I didn't even get to use the FTP "feature" to download the files into a backup. If I had known that would happen, I would have saved the money and used the DownloadThemAll! Firefox addon to just download the view links in the free File Manager in an automated way.

When I read the policy to discontinue the premium service, I don't even get a refund on the unpaid days I won't use. I won't use them because I yanked my decade-old account in my disgust. I had previously included Yahoo! in my list of webhosts as the cheap option when people ask me where to host, but I do not recommend places I have bad experiences with. Currently, my list of recommendations is reduced to Pair, Cubesoft, and Joyent. People ask why each of those are so expensive; I don't think they're expensive at all. You get what you pay for. In the case of Geocities, I have paid and have nothing.

As I reflect on what I've done with regards to this, I can't help but be comforted with my decision since Yahoo! is all mangled up with talks of getting sold or merging with other big monster companies. I'm especially not fond of the prospect of Microsoft getting even larger.

Publicly traded websites like Yahoo! are, if they haven't already, losing their way in the wake of finding ways to grow. I wonder why not more owners don't just find a comfortable size and sell or spin off the rest.

So for anyone who knows what my old Yahoo!/Geocities account was, I have finally shed it, all the spam it's mail account received, and the last remnant of the nickname from my online life.