Yes Bravenet. It's the site that provides me with two very good counters for sites hosted elsewhere. It also, quite obviously, provides me with free hosting for this site through its BravePages sub-service. Very nice and all that but I discovered something both hilarious and sad about them today. In the process of setting up my hosting for this site I needed to retrieve the login details for the account registered to my Yahoo e-mail address. All fine and dandy until the page came up confirming it had sent the e-mail. After the usual "Please don't loose your details" crap I was greeted by the following chunk of text.

"Remembering IDs and Passwords:
A lot of people, including us, find it a hassle to try to remember IDs and Passwords. We found this great free software that does the "remembering" for you. It's called Gator Software. This 1 minute download (275k) works great for remembering IDs and Passwords."

Notice what they're doing there? That's right, trying to get people to download fucking Gator. They fail to mention that downloading it will not only remember your login details for you but also infect your PC with a plague of pop-up ads. It's like saying to someone "Here, this glowing nuclear rod will light up your rooms for you" without bothering to mention it will also fucking kill you. I'd like to think people using Bravenet's services aren't stupid enough to download it but we all know that's just being naive.

Maybe trying to get people to download this is them trying to make up for having the crappest advert banners ever. I mean look at that shit at the top of this page. I've seen better personal websites than that mess. At least places like Geocities have the decency to have professional looking and neat banner crap popping up on every page. Perhaps the pop-up ads on this hosting are better. I wouldn't know myself, I'm not stupid enough to be browsing using Internet Explorer or Netscape. Get Phoenix kids, get Phoenix.

Written to Buffalo Springfield - For What It's Worth