Changes In Services

To me, one of the most annoying things on the planet is how quickly and abruptly things can change on the internet. It can be very frustrating to maintain just a simple website with a few links - within a short time a link will become unavailable, then another, and then another. I've found that I have to run through all of my links every once in a while just to make sure they haven't gone bad. I guess it's an inevitable part of the web.

More annoying is services such as Webring.Org or Egroups.Com which change totally overnight without so much as a how-do-you-do. Webring was particularly annoying to me (and many other webmasters) because the change was not only sudden but extraordinarily poorly managed. If there is an award somewhere on the planet for the worst managed and communicated changes, then the Webring changeover would most likely win first, second and third prizes.

The Webring change was particularly galling because webrings are part of so many websites. For example, my site is a member of well over 200 webrings, and I've created a special entry page for each one to help direct visitors to the appropriate pages in my site. The change (in mid-September 2000) caused all of these pages to become non-functional for hours, days and even weeks at a time during the changeover. I always find it interesting that a company can make incredibly severe changes in a service which is used by so many people (tens of thousands of websites at least) without asking any of them if they wanted to change and what changes they would like!

The Egroups changes are just as galling, although not as critical to websites. I know that I heard rumors of the changes for months, yet never received an official change date or explanation from anyone. Just one day I was required to get a Yahoo ID (which I didn't really want) and convert my egroups over to it.

Another service used by lord knows how many thousands of webmasters is now going through a massive change. The Netmind service, which allows webmasters to provide a notification of changes to their visitors, has announced it will become a paid service (and an incredibly expensive paid service at that) in March. If you don't pay their exorbitant rate by then, you will lose the service. To me, this seems very hostile to webmasters and the internet community at large, especially considering that the rate structure is so prohibitive that no smaller sites will be able to use the service at all. It's as if the company is saying "pay up or we don't care".

Yet another service raised it rates recently. The Atomz search engine (one of the best search facilities that you can get for your own web site) raised it's rates by about thirty percent. At least Atomz had the brains and common sense to only raise the rates on new accounts.

Hitbot is a web page statistics service which allows you to find out how well your web site is doing. It's a great service, but they just made a change as well. This is a little more subtle than most - in the past you added Hitbot to your site and you got a small "Hitbot" banner. A while ago for a period of a week this banner was replaced with one advertising flowers. I didn't receive any notification (to my knowledge) and I was a little annoyed. I'm sure that their terms and conditions gives them the right to do what they want, but I when I signed up I didn't expect this to become a banner service for Hitbot. 

Yahoo Clubs is about to go through a similar change of it's own. It's been announced that the clubs will be merged with the new Egroups (converted in January to a new format). This means the clubs will completely change, and most of the club members, if they even know about the change, are completely against it. They are very happy with their clubs and do not want any of these modifications. Yet no one has even asked the club members opinions on the matter.

Now, I do understand that these services are all businesses and they must make money. Software and hardware companies change their products on an almost daily basis sometimes - and they do not ask our opinions. They just make the changes they want to make. The difference is you don't have to upgrade your Office 97 to Office 2000, and your system won't stop working on the same day as Office 2000 is released if you don't purchase the new software.

However, let's look at it this way - suppose we assume that the webring is the equivalent of, say, the highway system. Netmind is the electrical grid and egroups is the gas company. Now, if the highway system owners decided that they were going to rip up all of the freeways and replace them with bullet trains, and they did so without telling anyone until the day it happened, you can bet there would be an uprising! If the electric company decided it was going to raise it's rates by 1000%, would you stand for it? And if the gas company decided, well, you really don't need gas, now do you - would you accept this without complaint?

That's exactly what's happening here - critical and vital services to webmasters are being changed out from underneath them without their input, opinions, permission or even, in many cases, notifications. Prices are being raised not by reasonable amounts but by hundreds of percent in some cases.

A webmaster whose webring no longer works (and the new, "improved" webring system simply does not work) must modify his website to accommodate the change or find a new service. In my case, I have over 200 pages to modify. If the webmaster also "owns" a ring, well, then, he has many more changes to make.

The egroups list owner (and the Yahoo Clubs owner as well) will be, you can be certain, spending much of his time for days or even weeks helping people convert their groups over to the new system. Yet he was never asked if he wants to make these changes.

I have received emails from dozens of webmasters so far about the Netmind change, and not one of them will be paying for the service. This means each of these webmasters must modify his web site to remove all of the Netmind links. In some cases this could mean thousands of pages need to be edited! This change was forced upon the webmaster yet he was not consulted.

What I find most alarming about all of these changes is none of them seems to be making anything any better. Webring changed overnight from one of the most wonderful site-to-site navigation systems that has ever existed to a piece of junk which could have been better designed by a two year old. Netmind is now charging but they don't seem to be offering anything better than when they were a free service. Yahoo Clubs does not appear to be headed towards improvement either. The only exception I've seen is the Atomz search engine - this product seems to be getting better every day sometimes.

What is the answer? Stop using all of these services! At least that's the tack that I am taking. I began with the Webring changeover - this was such a disappointing and poorly managed change that I decided to try my hand at installing a webring system on my own server. It worked like a charm, and now I run a dozen webrings without needing any other services.

To replace egroups, I've added a wonderful message board on my web site. Now my visitors can visit my site and have conversations without needing to get a Yahoo ID or giving out their personal data.

I replaced the Hitbot service with a couple of programs (Happy Log and Surfstats) which provide the statistics from the actual server log files. This not only gave me more accurate statistics (you cannot get better than the actual log files), but it improved my site performance since the load of the counter never occurred!

Atomz is a good enough product that I will keep it, but they allowed me to continue to use the service at the old rate for a couple of years if I want. Netmind can go to ... oh, you know what I mean.