"Face it, Flounder, you f***ed up.
You trusted us!"
- Animal House, 1977
Note: I am still rewriting this page, as I relocate this material from Internet Trash to a new provider. 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: 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 old parent site for this page was still located over at Internet Trash, where it had been for years:
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 a certain 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 replacement for the old parent site elsewhere, and I can tell you firsthand that $5.95 per month can buy an awful lot of peace of mind. So, from where did you enter this page? Click on it and you'll get back to where you came from.
