Letter to All
by Shena Delian O'Brien     
July 31, 1999

Hello all -

I just wanted to say thank you to all the offers of help that have been pouring in. I've had less and less time to work with Web Guard and know that there is a wealth of information out there today on the issues we address, that is not being included here at the site. Thanks to Web Guard and to the other sites that started spreading the word a few years ago, the 'net community is ripe with discussion regarding copyright and fair use issues.

Web Guard will continue to maintain a Webring and mailing list, and we hope to get a few writers willing to manage articles at the site so that we can hopefully bring you updated information. We will contact those who have written us with offers of help to see if they wish to handle any of that. If there are more of you out there who have or can research articles on copyrights,  bandwidth issues & keeping track of bandwidth thieves etc., please email me so we can set something up. 

Unfortunately we can no longer maintain a list of badge members. We just got so far behind, and after reading numerous emails from people willing to help with the list, I realized that with the  number of people linking to us, managing such an endeavor would take up more time than I'd be willing to ask of anyone. There was also another issue to take to heart.

When we started Web Guard, our idea was to spread the word to as many people as we could. This website does not make money, and does not even support itself. There are no membership fees and we have no reason to want traffic to our site other than to teach people about proper netiquette regarding copyrights and use of images and files on the internet. We figure that is a very good reason to ask for other people to link to us. 

In the years that we have maintained the badge list, and especially since I started falling behind in keeping it updated, irate members have written complaining that they weren't listed. I started realizing that many people just linked to us to get their site in our lists  and didn't really care about our goals at all - they just wanted free advertising for their page! This really distressed me. It wasn't why I had started a badge list at all. At some points it became such a  problem that I wondered if Web Guard was even worth the trouble.

I don't want that kind of issue to pop up again, and I don't want any of our volunteers to have to deal with it. Therefore, we no longer maintain a badge list. If you want your site listed with Web Guard,  you'll have to join the webring. 

This does not [mean] that our sincere members can no longer link to us! :)

We still have the buttons on our site and people can still use them on their pages. That has not and will not ever change. Thank you all for your understanding and support.

If you wish to contact me for a position, please write Web Guard.

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This page created:
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Last updated:
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