Yahoo is closing Geocities, many sites go offline later this year
A short note on Yahoo brought the news of the day – Geocities, the free page system, will be closing. Although the action is not immediate, it will affect millions of devoted users that have their websites there.
The official note states:
| We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways. We will be closing GeoCities later this year. |
No more details are given, except that more information will be provided in the summer and that Yahoo “encourage anyone interested in a full-featured web hosting plan to consider upgrading to our award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service.”
Sad news for many webmasters
Geocities was the revolution on the World Wide Web in the 90’s. It provided free services to millions of newcomers to the Internet. It was the starting place of many prestigious web designers today and everyone holds dear to the company.
Geocities was the place for learning html, uploading images and midi files. It was also one of the first predecesors of social networks, and it tried to put an order in the sea of information by achieving a directory like structure.
Geocities to be remembered
The Internet chess community will be seriously undermined by the impending closing of Geocities. A large number of small, personal and club pages were hosted by this Yahoo service. But some of the very important pages will go down as well. Probably the most prominent chess related website is Bill Wall’s Chess Page, a massive directory full of interesting trivia and historically important data. For example, take a look at his stretching list of Famous People Who Play(ed) Chess.
A problem solving community, which makes up a big portion of the chess playing population, will lose important archive of results from the World’s top competitions in the period 2000-2007.
Some of the clubs in New Jersey, namely Springfield / Checkmate Chess Club, Roselle Chess Club and Holmdel Chess Club, will be forced to move the pages to another place.
To all chess pages affected by the decision of closing Yahoo Geocities, Chessdom offers free hosting. Just contact the team and we will try to do everything possible to create a suitable environment for your site.
More on the closing of Yahoo Geocities
