If you are a Bellsouth web page owner yourself, you may
be asking yourself why I don't have the annoying top banner, pop-up ads and
javascript plastered all over every page on my website. Actually I do! Correctly
speaking,
here
is my Bellsouth home page. Notice all the junk Bellsouth adds to MY site?
And what the hell kind of URL is this?
http://home.bellsouth.net/p/s/community.dll?ep=16&groupid=45277&ck=
Reading Bellsouth's
Service Agreement
we spot a bit of irony:
(Section 12 Personal Webpages, a-c)
Ownership
of all graphics, text or other information or content materials supplied
or furnished by you for incorporation into or delivery through your personal
Website shall remain with you (or the party which supplied such materials
to you).
You acknowledge and agree: (i) that
the primary function of BellSouth's personal Webpage feature as it relates
to your personal Website is to facilitate access by end users to the information
provided through your personal Website; (ii) that BellSouth has no proprietary,
financial, or other interest in any of the content or information that
may be described in or made available through your personal Website; and
(iii) that you are solely responsible for the content, quality, performance,
and all other aspects of the information or other content contained in
or provided through your personal Website.
Your website belongs wholly to
you and
you alone and Bellsouth
has no financial interest in your website, eh? Then why do they plaster advertisements
all over
your site? It's also interesting to note that it does not
say anything about ads in the Service Agreement.
So what does all this mean? Well not much. If you bring these points up to
them, they will simply change it to read "We reserve the right to plaster
your ass with advertisements and if you circumvent them, we cancel your account".
They're a huge corporation. If they screw you out of money, it will take
6 months to get it settled, but if you find a way to make it harder for them
to annoy you, they'll fix that within a few minutes!
As far as I am concerned, any webpage created by me has a copyright that
belongs to me and any change Bellsouth does to my site i in violation of
that copyright. So here's how to get around all the ads and junk.
As far as I can tell, the address to your page should be laid out like this
http://personalpages.bellsouth.net/n/a/name/
(note that it must have the slash at the end or your site will not load.
With the slash, it will load the index page /name/index.html. The best thing
to do is just send everyone the link as /name/index.html)
Take a look at the n/a/name. The "n" is the first letter of your username
and the "a" is the second, so if your username is "johndoe", the address
should be http://personalpages.bellsouth.net/j/o/johndoe/
If your username is abc, the address should be http://personalpages.bellsouth.net/a/b/abc/
Simply make that your home page. When a person goes to it, it bypasses the
"community.dll" program that Bellsouth is using to manage websites*. If you
go through that file by using the address they give you, it retrieves your
page and adds all the banners and ads and displays the address as "ep=16&groupid=45277&ck="
If this doesn't work, another way to get around it is to make two temporary
webpages, call them index.html and test.html. On your index page put a link
to test.html. Not to the complete web address, simply put "test.html". Upload
them and go to your index page. Right click on the link to test.html and
select to open it in a new page. This should open the actual address of test.html
and it will look like this: http://personalpages.bellsouth.net/n/a/name/test.html
If that doesn't work, you may also try adding target="_blank" to the link
from index.html to test.html
And if that still doesn't work, shit they're onto us man!
I'm still unsure how to block the pop-up ads. It appears that they are
added to every page you upload onto Bellsouth's server. Right click on this
page and click "view source". You will see this at the bottom of the page:
script src="http://216.77.188.45/ad.js
If a person has javascript turned on, their browser will read the ad.js file
at 216.77.188.45. Although most people do, it isn't safe to surf the internet
with javascript turned on, I suppose that ad is what they get for using it.
There are some "noscript" HTML tags that could be added to every page to
cancel out the call to ad.js, but to be honest, I don't care. People shouldn't
allow an insecure language like javascript to run on their system every time
they visit a webpage period. If they're dumb enough to have it turned on,
I don't really want them visiting me.
* here's a look at the relevant section of community.dll
function convertUserIDToPDID()
{
var idInt = "0";
if( idInt == "") idInt = 0;
if(idInt==0) {
idInt = 1 + 100000000000;
var id = "Z" + idInt;
return id;
}
return idInt;
}
function loadStocks()
{
return "/p/scripts/context.dll?type=clickthru&id=1104&name=Nav+Stocks&redirecturl=http://home.bellsouth.net/bellsouth/scripts/staticpage.dll?spage=fc/stocksFrame.htm&cobrand=bellsouth&ck=&userid=1&userpw=.&uh=1,0,&pdid="
+ convertUserIDToPDID();
}
In short, this takes your webpage and runs it through http://home.bellsouth.net/bellsouth/scripts/staticpage.dll
which adds the frames and spits out a cobranded Bellsouth/your webpage. Or
in other words, it takes the webpage that you are full owner of and Bellsouth
had no financial interest in whatsoever, and litters it with advertisements.