Home Education Magazine

Date: Sun, 6 May 2001 14:05:38 -0700

This is a public service message from the publishers of Home
Education Magazine.

We're asking for help from the online homeschooling community to get
ALL links to www.home-ed-press.com changed to
http://www.home-ed-magazine.com as quickly as possible. The old
home-ed-press URL is currently linked to a pornographic website
administrated by a company in Armenia.

WARNING - Please DON'T check out that old home-ed-press site out of
idle curiosity, because it is a "virulent"* porn site that will keep
opening multiple windows until your browser or your whole machine
crashes. If you're really *that* curious to see what's there, please
save everything before clicking the link. *virulent - highly
infective, rapidly spreading, deadly

This message is on our website at
http://www.home-ed-magazine.com/badurl.html. We will post any updates
and additional information on that page.

A little history: We created the home-ed-press.com domain name when
we were publishing books on homeschooling several years ago. We sold
the book publishing part of our company when we decided to focus on
the magazine, but we kept the home-ed-press.com URL mirrored to our
home-ed-magazine.com site because so many homeschooling websites
showed to the old URL <home-ed-press.com> as their link to Home
Education Magazine's many features and free services.

But somehow the registration on the home-ed-press.com domain name
expired (we're still trying to figure out how it expired without our
knowledge), and it was bought by a wholesale company, which leased or
rented it just last week to an overseas company which linked it to a
porn site, obviously to capitalize on the high number of links.

So here we are, with a big mess on our hands: A widely linked
homeschooling URL linked to a gnarly pornography site. We are working
to straighen out the mess, but we need help. All the help we can get.

PLEASE - If you have a link to the old home-ed-press domain name on
your website please change it to home-ed-magazine.com as soon as
possible. Please check the sites for your local homeschooling support
group, your local public library, your favorite online resources -
anyplace that might have a link to Home Education Magazine's hundreds
of pages via the old home-ed-press.com URL.

Webmasters: We offer the following advice from Ann Zeise, who first
notified us of this problem:

Here's how to find out if you have any home-ed-press links on your
site. Go to the search engine at http://www.altavista.com In the
search field put the following parameters (exchanging my
www.gomilpitas.com URL for your own root directory in the last part):

+link:www.home-ed-press.com -url:www.home-ed-press.com+url:www.gomilpitas.com

If your site shows up at all on Altavista, you will be able to see if
any pages have the errant URL on them. Then just go into your copy of
these pages and do a ""FIND and REPLACE" and replace
"www.home-ed-press.com" with "www.home-ed-magazine.com" -- They kept
all the rest of the directories and paths the same, so your link will
now go to its original destination. (Do check in case you just happen
to have a link to a page they have removed for some reason. All of
mine were corrected this way.)

NOTE: using the first two parameters in this sort of search is a good
way to find out who is linking to you. Just put in your own URL after
"+link:" and "-url:". -Ann Zeise

Please forward this notice to homeschooling and alternative education
email lists, online newsletter editors, support group lists,
educational reference lists - anyplace Home Education Magazine's
award-winning website might be linked.

This message is on our website at
http://www.home-ed-magazine.com/badurl.html. We will post any updates
and additional information on that page.

Thank you for whatever you can do to help!

Mark and Helen Hegener, Publishers
Home Education Magazine
HEM@...
http://www.home-ed-magazine.com