I think it's fantastic that they are shutting down. One of my big time wasters was having to steer my daughter away form those sites.

Getting rid of the ugly, bright and misinformed sites is a boon to our online Pagan culture. Now, maybe people will be able to get past black starry backgrounds with stolen graphics and information.

I agree. Anything that reduces the number of webpages that feature flaming, spinning pentacles is fine with me!

And that damn music that you just couldnt turn off..But you can still find those type od sites on other hosts.Most pervasively was Draknet.

Thank the gods! Aside from the mass of awful sites with junk content (or stolen content), I am sadly and unwillingly linked to a poorly designed GeoCities site.

When in charge of a local Pagan event, I had a volunteer who set up a Yahoo site and an (unauthorized) GeoCities web site for the event. Then, she moved away and left the site pretty much hanging. Despite asking her to take down the site, it was still out there the last time I checked. This site was not what I consider serious work – it featured a Celtic border and fairy graphics of questionable origin and some really annoying music. I'm glad it will be going down.

While I would agree that we had a vast amount of drek when we had DrakNetFree (free hosting without the watermarks, ads, and whatever else Yahoo stamped on the site at no cost), that service has been closed for quite a number of years and in the course of doing support for the couple of thousand sites we host (most of which are not Pagan), I have to admit I haven't seen a spinning, flaming pentagram or been accosted by midi music in about as many years.

Most of the sites hosted now are pretty good quality sites – like this one.

Jen
DrakNet owner

I'm all for the purge, but not because it's embarrassing. I figure we ought to own up to our flaming-pentacle days, if for no other reason than to demonstrate how far we've come. I look at the GeoCities sites as the online equivalent of the phase most of the pagans I know went through in the first two years after they became pagan: I'm-a-gothy-witch-witch, Aren't-fluffy-bunnies-LOVELY, Fight-The-Power-of-Xtian-oppression, I-am-totally-winning-the-Mage-Wars, I-was-Arwen-Evenstar-in-a-former-life, or what have you. Most of us had some embarrassing phase when we talked a lot more than we listened, knew a lot less than we should, and in general made Big Flaming-Pentacle Pagan Asses of ourselves, and the older, more responsible pagans just smiled, and nodded, and waited for us to grow up a little before they agreed to teach us anything useful. I look at the cringe-inducing GeoCities sites kind of the way that I look at my ten-year-old journal (with "Book of SHADOWES" stenciled on the front cover in blood-red ink), with a sort of humble, "Oh, yeah, if I start feeling like I know everything again I need to remember this…"

(con't)

But what makes me heave a sigh of relief here is that so many of these sites are abandoned and no one is claiming responsibility for them. A friend spent almost two years trying to get a picture of her scantily-clad self with her legal name taken down off a Geocities site, because she never consented for the picture to be taken, or posted online, and the site had been abandoned for years. It had been set up under a pseudonym, and all the contact and reference information was out of date. Eventually she threatened legal action and they killed the pic, but the sort of bastardized no-man's-land of GeoCities made it really much more difficult than it would have been with a blog or a more actively hosted site (side note: another friend recently googled herself and found the GeoCities page she'd completely forgotten ever making. She sent out screencaps to all her friends for a good laugh, then dismantled the page).

Lol..um yea like i said..Yes Draknet had its share..Hmm i think i even mught have had a Dranetfree page for like a month.. Then my computer died…Now if they could just do something about Angelfire

In retrospect, while banning animated gifs and midi music probably would have vastly improved the Pagan web, the resulting uproar would not have been one I would have wanted to deal with.

No matter how much I was periodically tempted to do so.

Hmmm… I wonder if there is anything on there worth mirroring for prosterity? Maybe the heat is getting to me…

Yeesh that brings back memories…

I think it was on GC that I first started looking for pagan-related information online. This was the hey-day of Angelfire, FortuneCity, Tripod, etc. I fully admit I was 'impressed' by the now-horrid graphics, and midi music in the background. Of course I was a complete newb, and had no idea what I was doing. I ended up getting an account, which thankfully has fallen into a black hole, and the only content was a badly written fanfic.

While I'm happy for the purge, I am sorry to see it go. It's the end of an era, and part of our past.

Side note – I think I have a folder on cd with some of said graphics. I might go back for a chuckle, but they will never ever see the light of day again.

I really don't think the demise of GeoCities is going to eliminate embarrassing pagan stupidity from the web. There are many, many other sites out there where it's still thriving — discussion forums, blogs, Livejournal communities, etc. It seems a bit facile to try and pin all the blame for that stuff on one hosting provider.

I do agree that sites that can get it together to pay for a domain name may be *slightly* less likely to be completely harebrained, but only slightly. A domain name, and a hosting plan for it, really don't cost much these days, and having a bit of disposable income is no guarantee of not being an idiot. Nor, for that matter, is a lack of disposable income a guarantee of being one — there were a fair number of decent sites scattered across GC and other free providers, in amongst all the junk.

BTW, for anyone out there who still has a GeoCities site and is looking for an alternative, the host I use for most of my and my clients' sites (I'm a web designer) is giving away two years' free hosting and domain registration to anyone who's moving from GC and puts a page up saying they're switching to them: http://blog.dreamhost.com/2009/04/24/theyre-inter… (scroll down to the end).

I'm not surprised given the state of Yahoo's finances. I've kept the geocities site simply because it was easy to manage, but it will be no trouble to move to a new server.

Goodbye, gaudy web presence. We love to talk about the dangers of words and labels, but never does one suffer those dangers than when one identifies as "pagan" in front of co-workers or associates, only to have them go to the Internet to "check up" on what you mean by that- and find themselves directed to fluffy-crappy websites. People outside our circles don't understand that "Pagan" means many, many things, and that we can't be well-represented (usually) by the majority of websites and available information out there. The less internet pollution, the better. We can work on the terminology limitations later; for now, let's just cut out some of the dead wood.

Maybe I'm wrong in my understanding of how the interweb works but doesn't everything live forever in the Google wayback machine?

~Illisse

How can I find out which of my bookmarked sites are/were on GeoCities?

RE: Illisse

I believe so, yes, but when the websites are purged they will no longer show up in google searches, which is what I think is making quite a few people happy, as it will delete really bad information on paganism (of any flavour).

I stumbled across my share of GeoCities web pages back in the day (plenty of which were probably abandoned by the time I arrived). But despite the purge, a part of me does wish that some archive or record might be preserved of our "awkward adolescence." I've always found it fascinating to look at patterns of origination, how new religious movements grow in tension with and in response to mainstream cultures. From a sociological perspective, those gaudy webpages probably provide some insight into an aspect of how Neopaganism has developed over the past several decades. The blessing and curse of the internet: impermanence. No future archeologist will uncover the ancient dusty tomes of our history except perhaps as ones and zeros saved haphazardly here and there.

It's one thing to thank the gods for outgrowing adolescence… it's another thing to burn all the photo albums and melt down your mixed tapes.

"a haven for cranks bearing grudges in long-standing witch-wars"

Who needs GeoCities when Blogger can take care of witch-wars these days?

Aw, but this means we'll loose Ferigold, a site which tracked the ludricous extremes of Feri plagarism. My teacher (Francesca De Grandis) not only had her writing lifted, but one guy took her autographical blurb, changed the sex and claimed it for his own.

Oh yea, like all these sites on blogger and MySpace are any less trailor trash chic………….well, I'm sorry, but there are very few people out here likely to put energy into establishing a presence who have ANY clue as to how to create original art and original content. Coding is still the perview of 12 year olds and those making a living doing that sort of thing. As for the rest of us, we are do not have Masters in Website design degrees nor are we professional journalists. So, you continue to give us easy outlets, and we will continue to show up painting our little contributions with all the gaudy baubles you experts give or sell us, as though taste was a prerequisite for producing it.

And I promise you, ten years from now, everything you proclaim as being the "real deal" in paganism will be laughed at by those who somehow nail down the license to make such proclomations that you guys claim now. Remember the big hair of the eighties? It was cool then, so why are you laughing now? Think about it.

As a skeptical pagan, I am THIS shy of being atheist, and I consider 93% of EVERYTHING you experts claim as genuine paganism as suspect. I've found that if I simply embrace whatever makes sense to me, even on occassion some of those sweet little "fluffy bunny" sentiments, then all is well with my universe. I do not hide how I approach The Goddess or magik, I simply state what I can stomach, and I NEVER dare to proclaim my truth to be anyone elses. Those who claim the license to issue degrees in something which is faith-based and just this side of looney really need to get a clue and enjoy what their beliefs do for them rather then stir things up with declarations that "this is the way it's done" when hardly anyone other than those who dreamed it up do it that way.

And I swear to the Gods, the next time I hear that no one ever got burnt at the stake for being a witch, I will curse that idiot for all time! It happened. Get over it. Sigh…….it's hard enough putting up with humanity, much less pagan purists………..

Big hair is STILL awesome! Are you laughing at people with awesome hair? I hope not.

"Most of us had some embarrassing phase when we talked a lot more than we listened, knew a lot less than we should, and in general made Big Flaming-Pentacle Pagan Asses of ourselves…"

Oh, but it was totally worth it, just to have you grow up to write something this marvelous. Rowan, do you blog? I'd read you! I <3 this!

Makes me wish there'd been the spinning-pentacle inspiration for a "Book of SHADOWES" when I was 10, too! Thanks for the smile.

I see, Thank you. I thought Google keep a copy of very page that was ever brought up in a search (which to me is rather Big Brother OCD & takes up a hugh amount of space) but your explaination makes more sense than mine.

That should be *every* page.

I might be alone, but I will miss GeoCities. My first email address was at GeoCities. I learned how to make websites by playing at Geocities. I never made a "Pagan" web site, preferring, then as now, to be a bit more underground.

But I still have my first Geocities page, a Burning Man site and photo album. Sure, I've gone on to bigger and better things. (Now I have to pay for my web space.) But it was fun. I was new to the Internet, and GeoCities made a great introduction. Some of my original writing vanished mysteriously from that site a few years ago. I never could figure out why, but I didn't have the sense to back it up, so it's gone. Okay, it's just nostalgia, I know.

I do agree with those that commented about the lack of ways to deal with abandoned pages, though. They should have found a way to deal with that early on.

I've been building websites for about 10 years now, my first ever page was a geocities webpage…..lol. I have to giggle even now when I think about it as I've Moved from cut and paste to full blown dynamic, php websites…..but I was glad to have had somewhere like geocities to get me started on my journey….

I'm fairly sure it's not just the web-savvy Pagans who are surprised to find it's taken this long to switch Geocities off, it's the big majority of long-time Net users in general. (Could there even be people who've never heard of Geocities cos they didn't start using the Net until the service was long past its best?) I just checked my own Geocities space and I would appear to have not used it since 2003 or something. I did use it for an online journal back in 2000/01, but whacked that after I attracted an idiot stalker with it, and now all that's there are a few photos of no particular interest. I won't be sorry to see it go… but at the same time I will be kind of sorry to see Geocities itself go. For better or for worse (and sometimes it was more the latter than otherwise), it's a part of Internet history…

My own first site was a Geocities. To be honest, I'll be glad to see it gone. I loved it at the time, but I honestly had no clue what I was talking about, and I'll be glad to have the evidence destroyed for me!

A small part of me misses the days of tiled backgrounds, spinning gifs, and webring links out the wazoo. It was the internet that first hooked me, and it holds a fond place in my memory.

At the same time, I still have nightmares about those sites that had a static-scrolling background and felt it was necessary to do every single line is a different font and different color just to show off their coding skill.

Geocities still exsits? This was my reaction and my friends when I told him this. I clicked on a few of these links listed in your post and oh the memories of those days came flooding back to me. I must admit I will be a little misty eyed when they are gone forever.

Google doesn't own the WayBack Machine, thats part of the Internet Archive. Most websites get caught in it, but not all. And graphics aren't always caught, either.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.geocities… lo and behold?

The intellectual-property theft was always my main issue with what I and other local Pagans came to call GeoShitties after it ripped us off once too often.. I've never minded the flaming pentagrams that much; the professional-looking sites are great, but if we ever stop having a place in our hearts for little amateur ventures and little amateurish groups with bad taste, I'll worry that we're becoming too institutional, too elitist, or both. And as Alex Pendragon says, how are we suddenly the arbiters of what will be seen forever after as Pagan Correctness or even Pagan Good T
aste ™? I just want to kno\ the stuff I write will continue to be mine, and that my site's viewers won't
be assaulted with tons of slow-loading ads.

If y'all don't mind a suggestion, people with small sites on GeoCities may want to look at the webhost I moved mine to, http://www.81X.com . Its small-site tier is free, and it has a good, easy little sitebuilder tool and NO spam or ads. Nor do they hassle Pagans about content as long as there's no nudity or graphic erotica.

For larger sites, there's a good Pagan-run hosting service here in Louisville; contact
the manager, Allen Prunty, at allen@alprunty.com . I can vouch for his integrity and his
high level of technical knowhow.
.
Either place, please tell them Raincrone sent you.
Rain
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The blessing and curse of the internet: impermanence. No future archeologist will uncover the ancient dusty tomes of our history except perhaps as ones and zeros saved haphazardly here and there.

[...] Pitzl-Waters comments on the fate of Pagan websites hosted at Yahoo!’s Geocities free webhosting service, which will be phased out later this year (“The Wild Hunt,” [...]