"Face it, Flounder, you fucked up.
You trusted us!"
- Animal House, 1977
Note: I am still rewriting this page, as I relocate this material from
Internet Trash to Newsguy. As bad as what I was describing here was, it
just barely scratched the surface of the badness of service I was seeing.
I didn't mention how the Internet Trash server would go down for a month
or two at a time, how I had to track the owner down to get him to ask him
to clear out the needed diskspace for us to be able to continue uploading
files because the help address was no longer in service, how he threw a
temper tantrum when he was asked to fix the FTP ... etc. One of my
brothers came up with what I think is the most plausible theory: Rob Langfeld
of Langtech in East Brunswick, New Jersey (the
person running Internet Trash) set up the whole thing just so he could
pad his resume with a past managerial position, and we, his subscribers,
were just along for the ride.
This is what I wrote back when the Halls of Eternal Disbelief were still
located over at Internet Trash, where they had been since the late 1990s:
Here's the situation: a few years ago, my webspace provider
started
offering FTP access, and with it, the ability to set up subdirectories on
one's webpage. "Cool !", I thought, "This will make keeping my site well
organized a lot easier". I started building my subdirectories up.
A few months ago, FTP stopped working. Whenever I'd try to upload
something, I'd get the same message - "Sorry maximum users logged in". Not
cool, especially since there is no way to update pages in our
subdirectories, other than by FTP. (Fortunately, in the case of files in
our main directories, we can update by e-mail attachment or site manager,
so at least we could still work there).
I wrote to our sysop back in May, when this problem had been
already around for over a month. Yes, I tried logging in at all different
times of day, at different hours, and always got that message. Two months
later, and all that I've gotten by way of response is a surly letter from
the Sysop asking me to not cc letters sent to the help desk to Langtech,
which is listed as the registrant for this domain. That letter came after
a series of letters to the help desk went unanswered. I had sent a letter
to somebody who had written to me from Langtech before, and helped me with
a technical problem, doing so on the off chance that the help desk's inbox
was broken. I did not mail to Langtech without reason.
Two months later, I've seen no movement. FTP has not worked here for
three months, now. Not only has our provider refused to fix the problem,
our help desk hasn't even responded to any of the letters I sent to them,
trying to find somebody who could fix the problem, aside from sending the
aforementioned surly letter about cc-ing things to Langtech. It's time to
face facts. The FTP server is not going to get fixed, period. This means
that any pages which I have in my Cherry subdirectory, where I originally
uploaded my Burning Man material, can't be updated.
All that I can do for the moment, is place copies of the material in
question in my main directory, where I can still update the pages I have.
When I'm a little bit better paid, I'll get a non-free web account to host
this material and maybe some more. In the meantime, what can I do other
than ask you to please pardon the multiple listing? It just never
occurred to me at the time that these folks would invite us to use a
service and then refuse to maintain it. Sorry about my naivite on this
matter, but this is the first website I ever set up and there are some
lessons I had to learn the hard way.
That's putting it mildly. I have since set up the new Halls here at
Newsguy, and I can tell you firsthand that $5.95 per month can buy an
awful lot of peace of mind. So, where did you enter this page from ? Click
on it and you'll get back to where you came from.
- Introduction to "Bad Times on the Green
Tortoise"
- Burning Silliness Online