If you aren't interested in the Tripod thing, skip this mail.
But it looks like they weren't targeting fanfic after all. Here's a forward from another list.
----- Forwarded message from Senfic Admin Account riley@trickster.org -----
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 11:58:27 -0500 (EST)
Inside scoop from Derek Bruneau, director of engineering and personal publishing at Tripod:
"What's happened is that a technical glitch caused a bunch of sites to be removed accidentally. They're being restored today. Believe me, it wasn't targeted at anyone's site in particular. Lots of different sites [were swept] --including many of our favorites. It was just a really bad bug. Small bug, big effect. we're working as quickly as we can to get everyone's site back online. We know how terrible this is for members, so we apologize profusely. It's the last thing anyone needed right now."
----- End forwarded message -----
Other information recieved; it was apparently a bug in the software that automatically deletes offensive sites (like the ones that spam porn).
Considering that some people were saying that the deletions had the pattern of someone following keywords, I can well imagine that someone messed up with a program like that. Probably forgot to put a trailing quote or something, and it started deleting every site with the word "the" in it (well, probably not the word "the" in it, but you can see the kind of thing...)
Followups to the Spin list.
Kathryn Andersen -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- "Besides, I want to tame Blake myself. If he breaks, the others will. He will give us the spaceship. It will be a great achievement." -- Kommissar (Blake's 7: Horizon [B4])