Hopefully my website isn't complex enough to need very much explaining;
indeed, I try my best to make it quite simple and obvious. Certainly I will
never go as far as The Buffy Network (I will not dignify that site with a link,
but a Google search will turn it up, if you care — but beware, it's
incredibly bad), which has a huge help
section, mostly dedicated to
explaining why it's the user's fault that the site is broken in any browser but
MSIE. Oh, and the help
site is on a different server because their
ISP keeps suspending the
main site. I find it amazing that they don't realize it would be easier to fix their
site than to write and maintain all those extra pages. For that reason, I am
somewhat scornful of my own small help page, but I do feel that a couple of
the features on this weblog and site may merit some explanation, and I want to
provide that. This is also the place for things like Terms of Use.
Terms of Use
I have written my site for the edification and enjoyment of any human who
wishes to read its content in the traditional
manner. I take strong
objection to abusive robots, spambots, and bulk downloaders, and I have taken
measures to deny access to those who would abuse my site. The reason for my
objection to bulk downloaders is that they can easily be abused (for example to
copy a site whole - and yes there are people who do this for some reason). Also,
I don't want someone downloading every page on my site or in a section if most
of those pages aren't going to be read. It's an abuse of the server and of the
bandwidth I pay for.
I would like to make clear that my blocking of spambots is just to harrass them slightly, not to prevent address harvesting, since there are no email addresses on my site.
Oh, and I also take objection to spybot companies like Cyveillance,
Imagelock, NameProtect, or Turnitin, all of which make money by selling
trademark protection
or plagiarism detection services. They do that by
downloading my site, using up my bandwidth, and not paying me back anything
for my contribution to their business model. These spybots often disregard
robots.txt directives and/or spoof their user-agent identification in order to
get around blocks like mine.
I have considered putting a Creative Commons license on my site, but I decided not to, because I am not comfortable with the idea that anyone could use something of mine without asking permission. In the case that someone actually did think something of mine good enough to republish, I would be more than happy to give permission, but I do want to be asked.
There, does that help?
