Popups Must Die! has discovered that GeoCities (www.geocities.com) has indeed removed the dreaded Watermark from its user's homepages. Yahoo! finished it's acquisition of GeoCities on May 28, 1999. They then fired 200 of the GeoCities employees (two-thirds of the company's staff), and is moving the headquarters from Los Angeles to Yahoo!'s base in Santa Clara, Calif. This of course means less "GeoStappo" narcs to report TOS violations (like disabling Popups or Watermarks).

But, in a stunning move forward, GeoCities removed the code that produces the watermark from it's members pages. When they added this watermark (which is simply Dynamic HTML and Javascript) last year they upset thousands of people. This caused a mass exodus away from their service and sparked a whole wave of protests and angry customers. But, they did not stop. They continued to force the watermark upon their users even though they knew that it crashed certain web browsers and generally slowed down performance. The biggest complaint that GeoCities customers had (besides that it looked ugly) was that the watermark was actually a link when visitors clicked on it. Webmasters who spent countless hours to attract people to their sites could lose a visitor to GeoCities in a matter of one-click.

Hats off to the management at Yahoo! who have realized that to run a Web hosting service you have to LISTEN to your customers and give them what they ask for. The removal of the Watermark is a BIG step in the right direction!! If we could only convince Yahoo! to remove the stupid popup windows on every member's page then, and only then, we will make real progress in the area of Free Homepages and responsible advertising. Questions or comments should be sent to popupsmustdie@paradigm.nu