Greetings community leaders of Paris Neighbourhood,
I send this message to you because I feel that you are people some influence and importance to Geocities. I would like to talk to you about a petition myself and others have founded due to Geocities policy. GAAC.
GAAC stands for Geocities Anti-Advertising Campaign. It was created due to the agressive advertising techniques Geocities imposes on its homesteaders and the negative effect it has on the pages of all Geocitizens.
The first of what GACC opposes are pop up advertising windows. At first these were seen as a nuisance. The sponsors are companies like Surplus Direct from whom I receive EMAIL from and do not need to visit. Now, sometimes mulitple windows apperar for single pages, which can really slow down loading. I find myself closing these annoying windows before they even load up. Plus if I go to a link on that page and return to the index.htm it appears again! I do not want to spend my time closing windows that hide the pages I intended on seeing.
I know for a fact that many users are turned off by these, and just dont visit pages that throw four pop ups at them. This is bad for Geocities, bad for your sponsors and bad for the surfers out there.
The second item GACC opposes is the watermarks. These "translucent GIF's" are in some ways worse than the pop-ups since you cannot close them. They hinder the viewing of text and images, and generally make viewing a geocities web page an unpleasant experience. What is their purpose? It is already perfectly clear that it is a geocities page from the URL.
One might say that GACC is making a mountain out of a molehill, that all you have to do is close the windows and ignore the watermarks if you dont want to look at them. But the problem is a vast majority of pages I like to visit are from Geocities and I spend a great deal of my time closing and ignoring.
I created my first homepage at Geocities and had a great respect for the company and its neighbourhood attitude. This has changed to a dictarorship, inserting code into a homesteader's HTML files that they cannot get rid of. Does this sound ridiculous to anyone else?
Myself and others decided to do something about it, and if you agree with any of my above statements, I would appreciate it if you would spread the word. GACC is a petition page, getting EMAIL signatures form people who want Geocities to stop its aggressiveness. You can visit us here:
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Lights/8537/
I have moved my other home pages to Xoom. They offer 11MB of space, have a good support system, and only require a link back to xoom.com. Why would I make my page at Geocities when the competition is better and easier? Potential customers of your sponsors are being turned off of Geocities, and GAAC believes Geocities is not acting in the best interests of ANYONE.
In conclusion, simply watch this animated GIF. It pretty well sums up how we feel. Thank you for your time. Please respond to this, and know that GAAC is not slandering or insulting Geocities, just opposed to its actions.
Please view this:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/1869/thefuture.gif
