We started docweasel.com in 1996 (!) first as site for a band, then it morphed into a giant thing with a staff of over a dozen by 2001, writing humor, music and movie reviews, a webcomic, monty python scripts and various underground comix and some tits.
By 2006 we had a burgeoning forum with thousands (hundreds really active) of members and 200k hits a day. Other things got in the way and people left and were not replaced until only 3 of us were really contributing, and then in about 2012 the forum broke and I never bothered to fix it and the site really nose-dived. No updates, no weekly articles or humor, just occasional blogging about some subject that interested one of us.
From about 2012 to Aug 2017 the site was almost unupdated except a blog post every few weeks.
Then dotster sends some official mail to the doc@docweasel.com site claiming we had too many files, and even though we had an unlimited storage account we still had many more than the typical site so we had to remove some. Even though we had unlimited storage. Too many files.
So I sent back a profane email asking what the flying FUCk files they wanted deleted, and they sent me a couple folders. I deleted the entire folders without even seeing what was in them. I figured, fuck it.
Then I got another email, more files would have to be removed. Like, huge amounts of the images on the site, which would cause massive broken images, broken links and render the site unviewable. I told them to get fucked, the files were necessary to the site.
Then I get a the last email. In about 2002 we had started posting tits. No pron, no penetration, no sex at all, no naked men, just girls with their tits out. Pretty tame by even 2002 standards. We continued to update for 10 years until about 2012. There were thousands of tit pix mixed in with all the other images on the site in the various monthly/yearly folders.
From 2012 til 2017 these pix just sat there, no longer added to nor updated, smiling out from their various pages (you even notice how girls always smile big grins in tit pix, while guys try to look cool and macho and sexy, girls just grin away like they are having a ball with their tits out). I didn’t even think about them. We had also hosted a number of cam-girls over the years, probably most of them moms (or dead, like JessieKitty) and certainly retired by now. Lots of nakedness.
So the last email: they had detected, after 17 years, that we had tits on the site, which were against the TOS and must be removed. Now, there were probably thousands of tit pix, they weren’t marked by anything other than 2005_08_0201123.png so I had no way of differentiating between tits and other images, I’d have to go through them visually to cull all the tits, and anyway, it had become clear dotster, for whatever reason, was tired of collecting my money.
In the interim I had expanded my web work, designing and webmastering and etc. for dozens of sites and domains. Dotster suspended my entire account, I couldn’t use FTP to back anything up, I couldn’t log onto any of the WP sites to back them up (thank god I did that pretty regularly), they just shut me down.
Of course some customers were pissed, so I scrambled, got new hosting and most of the sites back up over the weekend. Even my personal sites were up within a week or so. Why did doster do this? I had been pretty vocal on mine and several other high profile blogs about the misuse of H1B visas, about the crashing of freelance work since (mostly) indians would do the work pennies to the dollar and how I resented US workers being put out of work (and sometimes forced to train their own replacements, see Disney) because of these visas. I still believe they are evil.
This may be a coincidence, but the guy who kept hounding me from dotster was indian. There were probably 3-4 dozen posts by me and guest posters about immigration, misuse of visas to gain cheap labor, the subpar work of some indian vendors, many of the cases of malfeasance and out and out rip-offs I’d encountered by same. Not saying an entire group is to blame, that would be bigoted and these days, ‘racist’ (SJWs have no idea what racist means, indians arent a race, but I was accused of racism many times for being against indian immigration to take US workers’ jobs).
This indian guy hounded me, found new ways to shut me down and finally drove me off their servers. No biggie, I was only on dotster to begin with because back in 2001 when we moved there (off a tiny local hoster we had since 1996) I’m not even sure if there was Network Solutions or GoDaddy or all those other hosting companies they have now. And we just stayed there out of inertia, I’m a lazy person, I had no reason to move. They were kind of a joke, when I told ppl my hosting they were like “they are still in business?”. So anyway, no biggie there, and thanks to backups I didn’t lose much more than a few weeks on some sites, the internet archive was invaluable in getting everything back to how it was pre-dotster.
Except docweasel.com. Docweasel.com was set up in about 1999 using .shtml text includes, which was the happening method back then. You used text includes for your headers, footers and content of the page, and used .shtml (basically same as html) as the framework to hang your text includes. It was a fine system, antiquated now, but easy to use and even to make major updates since you just updated one text file for headers, another for page sidebars and footers. You could have custom head, foot side on any page, you just used a template that called that text file you wanted. That and css files and you could make radically differnt designs using the same base framework.
However, I don’t want to continue with it if I’m going to put the site back up. For one thing, a lot of the content (and I’m taking huge content, thousands of pages of articles, humor, music and movie reviews, comics, pop culture stuff etc.) is very dated, some not too well done and not worth putting back up. 2nd, I want to use a WP framework for the whole thing.
So, I’m going back to the text files, using mass replace to get rid of the dross and updating tags. There are thousands of font tags, DL DT and DD tags, old tables, etc. We did convert to mostly css by 2006 but the old content still has all the font color=”red” size=”5″ etc. and many other nightmares. Things like all the IMG and I> tags are capitalized. Just looks weird to me A HREF. Anyway, cleaning all that up.
I’m starting with the Monty Python stuff because a friend of mine and I did all the transcriptions ourselves, sitting there typing it in and taking screenshots at the same time, for all the tv episodes, all 4 movies and most of the albums. There used to be a montypython(somthing).AU, an australian site, maybe it’s still up, where we could steal stuff like icons and etc if we didn’t feel like making them and we did a lot of that. All the sound files are wavs, oggs and aus. The video files are rms. The wallpapers are bitmaps. It’s like a time capsule. There are a bunch of MS PLUS desktop themes and even a desktop theme installer from Windoze98, I think it was. Might have been 95.
I’ll get to all this stuff. At this second I’m taking a break after doing all the TV shows and half of Holy Grail. I guess another week for MP, then on to comix. Then I’m going to slog through all the music and movie reviews and cull the bad ones and repost the good ones.
Then on to the “humor”, original fiction and other stuff. Probably take a month. Meanwhile, when I get a breath I’ll get the forum back up and see if anyone still remembers and wants to rejoin. Do ppl still do forums? I think stuff like FB has replaced it, ppl used to live on our forum, day in day out, all night long, long distance love affairs took place, people feuded and hounded each other IRL over posts, lots of fun was had. I kind of miss it, but not entirely, was a lot of work and after a while our bandwidth (you had to pay for bandwidth in those days, not like now) costs exceeded our advertising revenue and we started losing money and I had to shut down big parts of the site and take advertising from porn sites, which I was never comfortable with.
This time we won’t be replicating the titty pages, those days are gone. All the records they make you post about the models are long lost and I’m not going to risk legal issues to post tit shots. There are plenty of places to get free tits if you want them, docweasel.com just won’t be one of them anymore. Besides that, I don’t need the hassle from hosting again.
So, if anyone still cares, we’re back, I have 3 ppl helping me and we’ll get it all back up and see where she leads.