Writers, editors

[den]

Absolute Write shut down by spineless ISP after bogus complaint from scammer

or

ISP shuts down Absolute Write for bandwidth, TOS and AUP violations after telling scammer to bugger off.



hmm.

Comments

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Sounds a little fishy to me, when the ISP openly admits that they failed several times to notify the website of bandwidth problems.

Add to that the 1-hour notice of shutdown (with NO previous warnings, this looks even fishier), and a complete refusal to turn over the database (the ISP has now slid past 3 agreed-upon deadlines), and this comes across as a giant steaming pile of guano. The ISP has behaved in an unprofessional manner from start to finish; this is self-serving rationalization at best, out-and-out lies at worst.

Yes, lawyers are now involved, and there's the possibility of a real DMCA complaint being filed on the basis of copyrighted materials in the missing database.

[kayshapero]

Meanwhile, like a lotta other people I just downloaded the list. Mind you, it won't be used to do anything but take up space on my hard drive until I find out more about where it came from, but...

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

I think it came from the SFWA site.

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

The ISP says he gave them 24+2 hours to remove the email in the post, plus 24 hours to bring the account up to date and to save the database. I admit he should have warned the site for bandwidth violations, but he could have just clamped down on the excesses. He didn't cave in to Baur; according to his post he told her to piss off.

The post on the Absolute Write site is half the story (or less), and many of the replies come across as snooty and elitist.

Instead of feeling outrage I'm more inclined to side with the ISP who comes across as a hard worker trying to keep his company going.

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

There's a slight twist on that last item, though, as tnh also pointed out already: They shut down AW and almost immediately started a competing site.

...um. Tasteless, to say the least; at least wait for a week.

In the meantime, I'll believe the ISP's side more once I've learned that they have given AW their data back, at least, so that they can restore stuff on another service provider. Unless there was something in the Terms of Service that stated that anything hosted on the ISP's servers becomes the ISP's property, but I'm rather dubious about that. For $DEITY's sake, even LiveJournal ToS says that what we write here is our property.

[tnh.livejournal.com]

Sorry the tone offends you, but the ISP isn't telling the truth. Do you imagine that if they'd given AW more than an hour to save their databases, AW wouldn't have saved them? Instead, volunteer workers from the AW community have been out there scraping the remains of their message base from online caches, and are now trying to reconstruct AW from these rags and shards and splinters.

If you want a telling detail, as of this moment, no one at AW even knows what JC Hosting wants. Is it money? Does he want them to find a different ISP? Is it something else entirely? AW would be relieved and deliriously happy to do whatever it takes to get it straightened out. But JC Hosting isn't saying. They aren't talking, period.

By the way, are you aware that JC Hosting opened a competing site for writers within a day or two of shutting down Absolute Write?

This isn't an honest, competent working man having his reputation blackened. This is years of accumulated message base being shut down and possibly destroyed, on next to no notice, for what are either bad reasons or no reasons at all.

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

I saw the new writer's site last night. I'm disinclined to side with JC, now. It looks like they took the opportunity to shut down a rival site.

The US is a lot more litigious that Australia. Over here the data would have been archived and a copy given to a solicitor for storage, and a copy given to the owner of the data. Over there it appears JC were told not to talk to AW so they're not. At all, under any circumstances. Bloody lawyers.

tnh... (!) Good grief! It's you!