Years ago arrangements were made with a third party service to offer Free Websites @ yourname.electrical-contractor.net.

At the time I thought it was a good thing, offering free server space, and easy templates for building a simple website. Over the years though, the service has evolved to be something which I have less and less control over.

It's difficult to keep up with all of the spammers and amateur porn websites that keep cropping up. They're probably 95% of the signups now, more difficult to find, and I can no longer delete them myself. I think this has hurt ECN website rankings in the search engines too.

So, long story short, with regrets, I will be discontinuing the free web service here in the near future. If you have a website@electrical-contractor.net it will no longer be there a few weeks from now. You should make arrangements to move it elsewhere.

Bill

I would think the porn would increase the search engine rating :P

Bill,
That's fair enough.
It's a shame that spammmers and porn merchants seem to get in everywhere these days, they know they are not wanted, but they try it on all the same.
I would have thought that there would have been some laws with teeth passed and enforced by now, I mean, how old is the internet?

There wasn't a way to police that? How many free web sites were there out there?

I do understand the concern tho. I suspect that is why places like AOL discontinued their web services.
There are still plenty of fairly cheap web hosting places if you really want a business related site. I have two now with web.com. One is for the HOA esteroriverheights.com where I live and the other is gfretwell.com for me. I had been using a corner of the HOA site for my own FTP site but I decided it probably wasn't a good idea, even though I was paying the bill. The "electrical" directory is still out there but I pulled everything that was personal.

Greg,

When it started out I could monitor the signups, see the contact info, etc, and I could basically 'Approve' or 'Disapprove' what the site was being used for, and I could easily delete the accounts that violated the TOS agreement. All of that has changed over the years.

There are probably thousands of accounts set up, many inactive, I have no master list. Many times these sites are used just to forward to another site, or a links page. Now, when I come across one used for spam or porn I have to contact someone else to remove it. There are people out there that do this stuff 24/7 it's a PITA I don't need.

Bill

Mike,

I'm with you on all that....

It's a shame how much they've clogged things up too. I have to wade through a thousand or more emails a day on the average, about 98% is garbage. It's a sore subject for me.

Bill

Bill:
I think all of the legitimate people here understand your position.

I get inundated with junk mail also, and it is time consuming!

This is just the free sites right?
Does this mean they are also planning on dropping their paid website subscribers as well sometime in the near future?

KJay,

I was thinking about dropping the whole service. You bring up a good question though, if we could drop the freebies that would eliminate the bulk, if not all of the problem. I don't know if that is an option.

I don't want to leave anyone in a bad spot. I will see what I can find out.

Bill

I understand now. I did not realize how many accounts you were dealing with.

Greg,

If you're familiar with the sites AOL was offering (Homestead I think it was??), it's similar to that idea where it's open to anyone, anywhere... therein lies the problem...

Looking quickly, it looks like there's 2-3 new ones per day average.

Bill

Bill,

Thanks for the notification.

Feel free to chuck the Free Websites into the large Black Hole of Cyberspace!

Scott

It looks like there must be a BB somewhere that alerts people to free web space. I agree with Scott, chuck them.
I bet, even a small charge, would make 99% of the problem go away but there is really no good reason to do it. Web space is pretty cheap just about anywhere.

It could very well be automated, like the spam-bots that create new accounts with random profile information and spam forums.

Update:

I've disabled the Freebie account signups. This doesn't seem to affect any of the existing sites. I'll look into options next week.

Bill