Questions:

• Why was I blocked from accessing this site?
  
• Why does the message:

  These pages are served without commercial sponsorship. (No Advertisements). Bandwidth abuse will increase hosting cost and force sponsorship or shutdown. This server aggressively defends against automated copying for any reason including offline viewing, duplication, etc... Please respect this requirement and DO NOT RIP THIS SITE.

  appear on each page of this site?
  

• What does "This server aggressively defends against automated copying" mean?

Answers:

There are several reasons why we block grabbing / copying / spidering / ripping of the site:
 

• The content of this site is a valuable collection of the intelletual property of many authors. It is a challenge to protect this property while at the same time makeing it freely available and still rewarding the authors in order to encourage them to continue contributing. We do this by
  A) preventing the wholesale copying and redistribution of the site to reduce bandwidth charges and server load
  B) distributing products made by the site authors on the site and
  C) ensuring that authors are correctly credited for their work and supported in any way possible.
   
• Most users don't realize how big the site is. Some people see part of it and decide that they would like a local copy. But there are 3 4 GBs of content on this site even after compression. Something like 300,000 pages. Site ripping programs like webzip or MSIECrawler follow all the links as long as they stay on the same site. People think they are going to take a copy of the part they have seen, but it goes on, and on, and on. It is enough that Google and altavista keep indexing it... it takes forever for them to get the entire thing!
   
• Finally, spidering is exactly what SPAMMERS do when they are trying to collect email addresses from a site.

Spidering by Search Engines (google, etc...) is welcome.

If you want to save a page or so on your local drive or email a page to a friend, please go right ahead and do it! If you need more... please don't. Call 1-619-652-0593 or email jamesnewton@geocities.com if you want to talk about it. I can zip up and email sections or working something else out. Please don't ask me to "un-block you"; the "You've been blocked..." form is there for you to un-block yourself. Click HERE to go to that form

Copies on CDs of the public portions of the site (with all email addresses and private data removed) for offline viewing are available for a nominal charge (to cover the cost of the CDs, pay for the burner, and the time it takes) plus shipping and handling.

This is not a sale of the works on the site (they are always available free of charge via the internet) but only of the media and service of physically transporting the sites content en mass.

note: as of May 2004 the site will no longer fit on one CD even with extensive compression. As a result, the price is a bit higher now.

I can't afford to allow people who don't respect the warnings (or people whos ISPs don't respect my warnings) to access the site. When the server sees access from a web ripping agent, it automatically blocks the IP address, and emails the ISP of the user to let them know what is happening. The same thing happens when repeated access to hidden links or excluded content is detected. Blocked IPs are served a page that indicates that they have been blocked due to previous site ripping attempts from that address. They are given the opportunity to release the blocking by promising not to continue ripping the site and by providing thier email address for verification. Please don't ask me to "unblock you"; the form is there for you to unblock yourself.

CD copys of the public sections of the site are available for a very resonable price.