Important issues for WWW forums [Archive] - Large Format Photography Forum

Ed Richards

23-Dec-2005, 10:45

I build and maintain a large WWW site on legal issues. I also run some long-standing Internet discussion groups for law professors. These are tips I pass on to new faculty getting into the online world. They may be useful for those of you from the analog world who are starting to venture online:

1) Things that are posted on the WWW are immortal - once they get into the bowels of the search engines and the WWW archiving sites, they will keep popping up long after the original page is gone.

2) Anything with your name on it can potentially be read by anyone - all they have to do is google or otherwise search on your name for any purpose. For faculty, this usually means that someone checking out your publications or courses also sees your blog - even after you have wised up and shut it down. For this group, it means anyone looking to find your gallery will also be treated to all of your online comments.

3) Do not post anything you would be uncomfortable seeing on the front page of the NY Times.

mark blackman

23-Dec-2005, 11:05

Thanks for that, Ed. Next week will you be showing us all how to tie our shoelaces?

Jorge Gasteazoro

23-Dec-2005, 11:24

I think it would be hilarious if one of our flame wars was in the front page of the NYT........

Jeffrey Sipress

23-Dec-2005, 11:29

How can someone see a website if it has been removed from the server?

John_4185

23-Dec-2005, 11:34

Jeffrey: Here is a partial answer. www.googleguide.com/cached_pages.html (http://www.googleguide.com/cached_pages.html)

There are other stored resources, some specialized.

Ed Richards

23-Dec-2005, 11:35

> Next week will you be showing us all how to tie our shoelaces?

I always prefered the overhand knot...:-)

I know this seems like tying shoes for folks who live on the net', but for folks who do not, it is often surprising/disconcerting to discover that your kid googled you and found out about your "secret" life, or that your boss/spouse/date or people you have never heard of know what you have been posting on the WWW, and that this stuff does not go away. It is one thing to say, "Privacy?, Get over it", and another to internalize what that means in your own life.

tim atherton

23-Dec-2005, 11:36

the Internet Archive for one
www.archive.org - not perfect, but I've often found old info that's been dumped from a new version of a website

+ if you do google searches you can go to the cached link rather than the actual one, if the latter is dead , and it's usually still in google's giant multi mega cache

those are just two of many many palces where all this endless info is cached and stored

Oren Grad

23-Dec-2005, 11:59

You can prevent any website that you control from being "crawled" by the Internet Archive, Google and the like and from gaining web-immortality by loading the appropriate code on your server. That way it will vanish entirely once you take it down, unless someone with an ax to grind took it upon himself to seek out your site and save the content privately while it was up. Of course, blocking the search engine crawlers also makes the site harder for people to find while it's still up.

But in general, Ed's advice is right on. Just always remember that places like this are truly public forums.

Kirk Gittings

23-Dec-2005, 12:09

There was a guy that years back I had a heated email exchange with about a stupid review he did of one of my books. My responces were a bit arrogant, which I regreted, but I never expected them to be posted on the web. He posted our interchange for years on his website and had it pushed so if you Googled my name it always showed up second. Ironically it was good advertising for my book and led to many sales. He left it up for like 6 years until I finally told him that he was helping me sell books. He immediately took it down.

Oren Grad

23-Dec-2005, 12:14

Ironically it was good advertising for my book and led to many sales. He left it up for like 6 years until I finally told him that he was helping me sell books.

Life is wonderful... :-)

Kirk Gittings

23-Dec-2005, 12:15

I take that back. He has posted it again:

http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/mjhinton/prose/perspective.htm

What most annoyed me about this over the years was that I consider email to be private correspondence and I don't expect to see it posted on the web without permission. I guess I have more quams about such than some people.

Frank Petronio

23-Dec-2005, 12:29

Mottershead posted some crap about me on his little photo.net site and now it Googles a bit too high up the list for my taste. But he's a bastard and that is something I will comfortably say to the g@d@mn tratiors at the New York Times.

Jack Flesher

23-Dec-2005, 12:39

Oh come on Frank, don't hold back... Tell us what you really think!

Eric Jones

23-Dec-2005, 13:01

Kirk,

What particular film are you using for your Architecture work? I would venture to say Tungsten Balanced Negative? I love the magic hour blue quality to them. BTW, you may already know this, but the links to your articles on your site are broken. I was interested in checking them out.

Thanks

Eric

David Luttmann

23-Dec-2005, 13:28

Hey Jorge,

Maybe the NYT will give us some front page coverage for an interview on the "Clash of the Fanatics." Bring your boxing gloves & a camera.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Jorge Gasteazoro

23-Dec-2005, 13:32

Maybe the NYT will give us some front page coverage for an interview on the "Clash of the Fanatics." Bring your boxing gloves & a camera.

Hey men, I'll take fame any way I can......from the NYT to the uppity galleries in Soho... :-)

QT Luong

23-Dec-2005, 16:14

"Mottershead posted some crap about me"

If that's not true, sue him for defamation. If that's true, you have only yourself to blame :-)

John Flavell

23-Dec-2005, 17:32

Frank, just curious. What did the NY Times do to be traitors?

Oh, and thanks to Mark, I've trouble with the shoelaces all damn day.

Frank Petronio

23-Dec-2005, 17:54

Just my pre-Christmas gas passing. I'll share my low opinion of the NYT outside the forum but no good comes of bringing up the obvious to people predisposed not to see it. As for PN, I was only guilty of owning a Leica and thinking the Leica Forum was a place to talk about it.

Kirk Gittings

23-Dec-2005, 17:57

Eric it sounds like you are seeing my new website which shouldn't be possible. does it have a black or white background? here is the direct link: http://www.gittingsphoto.com/Articles/

I only use daylight neg films. It corrects back very easily because it is so forgiving whether you are scanning or doing C prints.

Oren Grad

23-Dec-2005, 18:37

Kirk, the new website is definitely up - nice and easy to get around. The "articles" link brings up the menu of articles, but the individual article links don't work. Ditto with the resume link from the biography page.

Kirk Gittings

23-Dec-2005, 18:53

Oren,

Odd I get my old site even when I clear the cache and history.

Frank Petronio

23-Dec-2005, 18:56

It's 404ing the articles Kirk

Paddy Quinn

23-Dec-2005, 19:02

"But he's a bastard and that is something I will comfortably say to the g@d@mn tratiors at the New York Times."

well, at least you can't acuse them of being pinko liberal left wing and anti-administration - after sitting on he story of Presidential law breaking for a whole year

robc

23-Dec-2005, 19:53

' You can prevent any website that you control from being "crawled" '

Oren, this is not actually correct. What you can do is put code to effectively ask well behaved crawlers not to crawl or archive your site. You can also block IP addresses of known crawlers but what you can not do is stop any unknown (to your code) crawlers or any badly behaved crawlers which use constantly changing IP addresses(false ones) from crawling your site. There are many web archive sites which are badly behaved. Google happens to be one of the few well behaved crawlers.

The only effective way to ensure your site is not crawled is to password protect it. For most web sites this is self defeating.

Ben Diss

23-Dec-2005, 20:01

Kirk- I read your exchange on Mark Justice Hinton's site but I can't see where I can buy your book. Oh wait, here it is:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/offer-listing/0826312780/ref=dp_olp_2//103-6467018-9327028?condition=all
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/offer-listing/0826312772/ref=lp_g_1/103-6467018-9327028?%5Fencoding=UTF8

(snicker, snicker) ...and yes, I bought one.

-Ben

Oren Grad

23-Dec-2005, 20:06

Oren, this is not actually correct. What you can do is put code to effectively ask well behaved crawlers not to crawl or archive your site.

OK. I know that Google and the Internet Archive ("Wayback Machine") are well-behaved in this sense, but I don't know as much about malicious sites. Thanks for the correction. Just for my own education, off the top of your head can you point to any specific archive sites that are ill-behaved in this way? I'm curious as to exactly what they're doing with the information. Harvesting email addresses for spam?

Kirk Gittings

23-Dec-2005, 20:21

Thank you Ben!

Frank, sorry I have no idea what that means.

Oren Grad

23-Dec-2005, 21:08

Kirk, "404" is just the code for the "page cannot be found" screen that you get when a link doesn't lead anywhere.

robc

23-Dec-2005, 22:20

off the top of my head? No. Last time I looked, which was quite a while ago, I found stuff I didn't expect to find as I had used noarchive on some pages. I just decided it wasn't worth worrying about. The big boys seem to be quite well behaved and the rest are quite insignificant.

For more info you can look at:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html
http://searchenginewatch.com/

A quick look at my stats show approx 200 different robots have visited my site over the last year. What they are all doing with the info they extract I have no idea. Some may be going to search engines, others for analysis of some kind, others for archive. None for email spam because my email address doesn't exist in my web site.

Oren Grad

23-Dec-2005, 22:30

Rob -

Thanks for the link, that's a super resource for getting oriented on this stuff.

Frank Petronio

24-Dec-2005, 08:24

You can set up the hosting server to load an error page that links back to the home page in the future - a nice, professional feature that is often overlooked.

paulr

27-Dec-2005, 23:57

"I'll share my low opinion of the NYT outside the forum but no good comes of bringing up the obvious to people predisposed not to see it"

it's funny ... i know a lot of people who consider the NY Times to be a fascist tool of the conservative media. hatred of the Times has always seemed to be a good litmus test of the degree of someone's wack-o-ness.

i'd be really curious to see what people consider evidence of bad journalism, or significant bias in the news section of the times. media critics of every political stripe have ranked it among the two or three best newspapers in the world for a long time. usually right behind the wall street journal, which couldn't be farther from the times, if you look at the editorial page.

tim atherton

28-Dec-2005, 08:39

"i'd be really curious to see what people consider evidence of bad
journalism, or significant bias in the news section of the times."

err - one of the worst cases in recent years - Judy Miller

paulr

28-Dec-2005, 10:57

yeah, Judy Miller was a major gaffe. there's a difference between screwing up and fostering a culture of bad or corrupt journalism (as is done by many of america's favorite news sources).

for what it's worth, Miller's misinformation bolstered the position of the administration--it reinforced the lies propagated by the white house and fox news and other republican agencies, so i don't see how it could be evidence of treason or even of "liberal media bias."

Frank Petronio

28-Dec-2005, 11:13

Lies? That you consider what they've said as lies while ignoring the lies made in the mainstream media says it all. If this were WW2 Roosevelt would have shut the paper down and hung all the bastards as traitors.

paulr

28-Dec-2005, 11:21

you're swinging a big club, frank ... why don't you start by telling us what truths are being misrepresented, and what media you consider to be mainstream.

and i'm curious ... where do you get YOUR news?

Paul Butzi

28-Dec-2005, 11:26

Paddy Quinn

28-Dec-2005, 11:33

paulr

28-Dec-2005, 11:41

just keep in mind that running a newpaper requires developing a certain bond of trust with the reporters. at a good newpaper, that trust is laboriously earned over a long time. that doesn't mean it can't be broken. with certain kinds of news stories, it's not possible to independently verify the facts, at least if you want to do it while the story is still news. so you extend trust.

for whatever reasons, previously good reporters sometimes snap and and violate that trust. the paper is screwed in those situations.

none of this is the same as the troubles that plague so much journalism these days ... like Rupert Murdoch using "news" as a platform purely to push a political/financial agenda.

a good paper has a firewall between its news section and its editorial section. and its management. i trust the news section of the wall st. journal, even though its editorial section tends to represent politics that i profoundly disagree with. but i find their journalistic standards to be first rate, so the opinions of the op/ed writers and the publisher make little difference to me.

Frank Petronio

28-Dec-2005, 19:35

Yawn. You guys are so full of it. Iraq has successful elections and many supportive people but you'd hardly know it from our mass media, lead by the hacks at the NYT. They print 5X more negative stories than positive ones.

paulr

29-Dec-2005, 00:54

have you ever read the times, or is this what rush limbaugh tells you about it?

show me where the treason is today:
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/index.html

it is true that with all the happy things going on in the world today, in iraq, iran, the gaza strip, central and south america, chechnya, china, north korea ... it seems silly to dwell on the sad things.