re. Intolerance

I like atspace.com. It is a very reliable host, and it is interesting that the owners have mentioned “the intolerance of the old data center to the abuse issues that arose recently.” A lot of mindless intolerance is perpetrated on the Internet every minute of every day. Take bloglinker.com, for example. The site was down for part of the summer, and that downtime caused its members’ sites to stall and not load properly – visitors and customers could not properly view bloglinker’s members’ web sites, not unless the site owners removed the javascript bloglinker had given them. Bloglinker’s owner, Zaeem Maqsood, promptly blamed his web hosting company (he claimed that they shut him down without notice, and that they did not save a copy of his database). Maqsood then went on to ban commercial sites from bloglinker, even the semi-commercial sites that had joined months before. (Whatever he means by “commercial.” Perhaps it was just that he had not clearly asked commercial sites to stay away, or maybe he had not explained himself. Did he mean all sites pertaining to commercial ventures, irrespective of whether the sites made money or not? When Maqsood was in school, his professors required explanations, not three-word generalizations. But now, as a self-professed e-hunter, he presents vague four-word English constructions to disabled persons and to foreign non-English-speaking Internet surfers. If I am a semi-educated handicapped Filipino, and my site does not make money even though it should, and I do not expect it will ever pay for my time, why would I call it a commercial web site?)

Then in August Maqsood asked his membership to hunt down all the “commercial” sites so that he could try to label them spam and then ban them. I say maybe the web host that kicked him out and lost his database was anticipating his witch hunt.

But back to atspace.com. Here is today’s communication: see the bottom half of http://freepgs.com/ledbetter/wordpress/?p=131