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© Copyright 2002, Jim Loy
Let me rewrite this gruesome story for you. MCN (Montana Communication Network) was my Internet provider (ISP). I had a few complaints about them, nothing serious. They accidentally reset my visitor counter, for one thing. And the connection was occasionally slow or busy. Then they were bought out by OneMain, which had previously been bought out by Earthlink. As they were changing over, I repeatedly received email saying that this would not affect my service.
Then, for over two months, I was not able to upload changes to my WWW pages. It turned out that my FTP access had been cancelled accidentally, and it took them two months, and many service phone calls, for them to correct this. Calls to their 800 numbers routinely left me on hold for a half hour or more. A couple of times they accidentally disconnected me, while trying to reroute my call, resulting in another half hour wait. Once the Customer Service person accidentally changed my email address (from jimloy@mcn.net to jimloy@onemain.com); from then on they "couldn't" changed it back. When they finally began forwarding mail addressed to jimloy@mcn.net, I was swamped with hundreds of messages.
MCN was eventually going to disappear. So, all of my URL's would change. In my inexperience, I had built my WWW pages with absolute links for my links to my own pages. I had "http://www.mcn.net/~jimloy/checkers.html" (external) when I should have had "checkers.html" (internal). And I learned to use relative links like "../award.htm" which goes to the parent directory to find the file. Besides that, all of my thousands of files were in one directory which really slowed FTP access (mostly directory listings). A massive reorganization needed to be done. Unfortunately, all of their email warning me of the impending demise of MCN went into my spam bin, as I was filtering out email that was not addressed specifically to me. That was my fault. Anyway, I was unprepared when they moved my files from MCN to OneMain. I spent a couple of weeks reorganizing my WWW pages. A few errors escaped my notice until today. But my pages benefitted greatly from this reorganization. But it was done in panic. My pages were now much more portable. And they needed to be portable because they were going to move me again.
When they moved me again, I lost my Internet access completely. It took several days, and several long service phone calls, to find out that my account name and password had been changed. The password no longer had a capital letter in it, and they couldn't put it back. And they changed my account name a couple of times. And my email was no longer being forwarded to my newer mail boxes. I never figured out how to reestablish the forwarding. It took weeks to find out how to access my email with my various mailboxes. Then I was swamped with hundreds of messages. Eventually, mail addressed to jimloy@mcn.net was lost.
My WWW pages were now portable, with small exceptions (like where my email address is mentioned in my pages). But many many WWW directories and people's home pages linked to mine. Many still had my old MCN URL's, since this had all been happening too fast for me to keep up with. And OneMain/Earthlink kept changing my URL's and would probably do so in the future.
The only solution was to buy my own domain name www.jimloy.com. Well, if I did that, then there was no reason on earth to stay with OneMain/Earthlink, a company that I was very dissatisfied with. I didn't even care if it cost more. I was fed up. So I switched to IMT (Internet Montana). They are not perfect. But they are better than MCN/OneMain/Earthlink.