Tripod's Position

Tripod's Position is neatly summarised in a letter sent to Tripod members about 'remote loading'. The text was as follows:

On August 18th, Tripod instituted an interstitial page to help us stem the burgeoning problem of remote loading from the Tripod members servers to other services. Remote loading is a drain on Tripod's resources and interferes with our ability to provide free web space for our members.

Tripod accounts are for use in the creation of web pages, not as storage space for images, zip files, sounds, etc. to be loaded on other services. This is clearly stated in our terms of service:

Tripod Member Web Page and Member Conduct Guidelines
The following is a non-exclusive list of actions and content that are prohibited on the Site. Tripod may cancel any Membership associated with such actions or content or may remove any associated Member Web Page with or without prior notice, in its sole discretion.

i) Use of a Member Web Page as storage for remote loading, or as a door or signpost to another home page.

It costs a lot of money to host free web pages, and when our servers are taxed with no pageviews (i.e. remote-loading on e-bay and webtv emails) we are simply throwing money away. From anyone's perspective, this makes no business sense.

What this means is that Tripod no longer allows the embedding of MIDI's, WAV's, MPEG's, and similar files from remote sources (e-mail and non-tripod sites such as auctions.) You may still freely embed files on your own pages with us. We have allowed the remote use of GIF's, as this type of file is reasonably small and is most often used in banner exchanges and webrings. Please be aware that this is subject to change.

Thank you.

Amy Johns

Membership Services
Tripod, Inc. / A Division of Lycos

Posted on January 8, 2000