It's how Yahoo! (Rick) Roll...
Jul. 4th, 2015 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ffuturesSeveral years ago Geocities, a big web host that amongst other things had tens of thousands of fanfic sites, went out of business. Yahoo! bought the company but did't want to keep the business going. A lot of the things they hosted stayed on line but could no longer be modified or updated.
Some time last year links that formerly accessed these sites started to go to a Yahoo! Small Business page that tried to sell you web hosting and also Rickrolled you.
Last night I hit a link from Fanlore.org and noticed that this was still happening. I also wondered why, so took a look at the Wikipedia articles on Geocities and Rickrolling and found it wasn't mentioned there. So naturally I added it to both at about 12.30 AM then went to bed. By 9.30 today Yahoo! modified the page and removed the embedded video.
I can only assume that Yahoo! has bots constantly monitoring Wikipedia (and probably other sites) and a team of ace web managers poised to swoop on anything that might be bad publicity. That or a REALLY weird coincidence...
Some time last year links that formerly accessed these sites started to go to a Yahoo! Small Business page that tried to sell you web hosting and also Rickrolled you.
Last night I hit a link from Fanlore.org and noticed that this was still happening. I also wondered why, so took a look at the Wikipedia articles on Geocities and Rickrolling and found it wasn't mentioned there. So naturally I added it to both at about 12.30 AM then went to bed. By 9.30 today Yahoo! modified the page and removed the embedded video.
I can only assume that Yahoo! has bots constantly monitoring Wikipedia (and probably other sites) and a team of ace web managers poised to swoop on anything that might be bad publicity. That or a REALLY weird coincidence...
