Some Close Runners Up... Sailormoon Sites
  May 2000

Here's some sites that came close to being called to the "Worst"...

worst banner

Page: Realm of the Crystalstars
URL: https://www.angelfire.com/anime/crystalheart/
Creator: Kristen Petty - Well she's not really "the creator", but she does own the webspace.
Nominated by: Sailor Antheia, Melissa, Starchaser, Kristie

Comments:

CereCere

First of all, this site is actually nice. It's a fanfic site that revolves around a series of stories based on a group of fan created senshi. It also features some nice items like character profiles, complete with some great fanart. The loading and setup is also very nice. Now by this point you're saying, "Wait a sec, I thought this was the runner-up review page, not the best page." Well, let's see, yes, there is a red background, and it does say "Runners up" on top... By now you must have figured out there is a catch here, and you would be right. While this site is very nice and all, not one bit of it belongs to the webspace owner.
Try this site: http://risa.risanet.com/~crystalfyre/crystalstars.html Similar looking, are they not? It's actually kind of hard to figure out which is the copy and which is the original. However, on the original risanet.com site there are more recent items, more fanart, links in the links page, more chapters of the fic, and also more people listed as working on the site. There's also the lovely tell-tale source code, the Angelfire site was created by using Angelfire's online page maker, with the source code of the original site copied and pasted in. How can you tell? Well, two different HEAD, TITLE, and BODY tags makes it pretty obvious. One set of tags at the top, another part way down and after the "Freetext" comment tag, Angelfire's inserted tag to tell you where to place your own code. Why would anyone just copy a site like this? I have no idea, I can only imagine they either have a grudge against the real owners of this material, or it's someone who's just starving for attention.

VesVes

Ooops! It's already down. Turns out Cere was right, it was only someone bent on revenge and jealousy.
Yeesh.

JunJun

I don't really think there's anything to add about plagiarising and copying an entire site. Like CereCere, I don't really know *why* you'd do it other than to show off about stuff you couldn't make up on your own... but this is a fanfic site, so it's even weirder.


Page: Sailor Mar's Cherry Hill Temple
URL: https://www.angelfire.com/anime/cherryhill/
Creator: Karen
Nominated by: ?

Comments:

CereCere

Useless splash page alert! All personal to your mouses! Looks like we're going to have to click to get in here! People keep asking me why I dislike Splash Pages with nothing except a "enter" link on them. Simple, it's a waste of waiting time, and a wasted click. Not to mention there is a reason why the default page of just about every site is named "index.html", not "splash.html" or "cover.html". It's meant to be the site index.
Anyway, enough about that. Parts of the true index page do take long to load, but you don't need to break into the loading song, because the important stuff on the top part of the page loads up pretty quick, it's all the extra junk on the bottom that takes a while to load up. I would suggest moving any of those extra animated pics that have no links into the picture section. To the subsections we go, the picture section uses false thumbnails. That is, full-sized pictures that were resized using the width and height properties of the IMG tag, rather than true thumbnails that were resized in a image editor, saved in a smaller size, and then used as links to the full-size pictures.
The only sections that work are the downloads section, the vote, link me, and links pages. All the other links lead to Angelfire 404 pages. By the way, I should mention Angelfire's nice idea of coming up with some funny little messages for their 404 pages.
Well we aren't done yet. There is a ton of stealing on this site. First, let's look at the downloads section. I notice there were some links to some Geocities sites there, so of course I checked out those sites to see if they belonged to this site's owner or to someone else. Turns out they do belong to someone else, and therefore, she's bandwidth stealing. Actually the files belong to Sailormoon Heaven, one of our runners from last month. Plus, after rechecking SM Heaven's Download page, I discover it's the exact same HTML used for Cherry Hill's download page. Direct-links and steals the HTML too! -- Yes, you all may face-fault and fall out of your chairs now.
Then there is the index page. Part way down on the right is one of our own "Best of the Month" banners, with a message saying the award was won in April of 1998. In trying to figure this one out, I visited our archives and then realized where I had recognized the index layout from. It's from ESH's original layout! The owner copied and pasted the code, including our award banner, Marie's (ESH owner) old copyright notice, plus the image of Marie's company logo! The intro text is even from the old ESH, Cherry Hill's owner tried to change all the ESH references to "CHT", but missed a couple "ESH"'s. Uugggg... Do I even have to say stealing code, layouts, and files is wrong? One more thing, if that all wasn't enough. This site seems to occasionally mess with your browser, the display is all distorted at times. I have no idea what is causing it, other than possibly the use of .art picture files. You know, these two runners up could just as easily be Worst of the Month, maybe we should say it's a three way tie or something...

JunJun

The splash page is kind of cool. It has an animated gif of Rei that just says "Welcome, Click here" more or less. And the gif itself is just sooo cool and informative, I didn't mind wasting my time on having it load up for me. (Sarcasm, friends.) Anyway, on the main page... Yeah, it IS pretty funny how the whole intro and the "Copyright Stuff" was stolen from the ESH... not for the ESH, but for the page, when it says "Also, to get the most out of E.S.H. you should try to view it at 800x600 screen resolution." On top of the page is an icky animated gif that doesn't help the page, only hinders it. On the bottom after all the plagiarised stuff are lots of animated gifs, webring stuff, guestbook stuff, and other stuff that doesn't work, just adds to the loading time.
The picture area claims "These are all thumbnails." Well, no they aren't. They're just resized, fake thumbnails. And most of them are .art files to boot. The "links" page is aligned poorly, and some of the pictures don't work. The "Win My Award" page just has a sign-up form but doesn't explain *anything* about the award, so how are you to know why you should win it if you don't even know why it's being awarded? "Mar's Poll" has one poll all the way to the left of the screen. Most of the other links don't work, so instead you get to read Angelfire's witty comments about how the page doesn't exist; and the "Rei's Downloads" page does work but direct links to "Sailormoon Heaven", which as Cere noted is a bad page in itself.



   Worst / Runners Top || Main || Email   
© 2004 AQ