Making Light: Absolute Write is gone

Making Light: Absolute Write is gone

Absolute Write is gone
Posted by Teresa at 09:19 AM

As of last night, Absolute Write was gone. It was one of the leading sites for information on writing and publishing, especially the scam versions thereof. Their ISP pulled the plug on them one hour’s notice. Now, where there should be a broad, deep online community with an enormous message base going back years, there’s this.

Among other things, AW was the main collection point for information about PublishAmerica.

How this happened: remember Barbara Bauer, that horrible old harridan and scam agent who tried to get me fired because I reproduced the Twenty Worst Agents list and she was on it?

Apparently Barbara Bauer made a screaming, abusive phone call to one Stephanie, the person who owned the web host. Bauer claimed that having AW’s scamhunters post her email address at AW was illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and that doing so had caused Bauer to get spam, which meant that AW was a spammer, and that this would get the web host put on every blacklist in the world.

Mind, the message that quoted Bauer’s e-mail address had some time ago been amended to remove that address. Furthermore, Barbara Bauer posts that exact same email address on her own website.

Stephanie had no more sense than to panic and shut down AW on an hour’s notice. I’m given to understand that some of AW’s message base was lost. For the record, AW was hosted at:

JC-Hosting
TotalWeb International Net Consulting
4037 Navaho Trail
Nashville TN 37211

Toll Free: (877) 411-7891
Phone: (615) 469-7533
Fax: (615) 250-2430

Stephanie’s been known to post as “Moonshadow” at Absolute Write. The wonderful fact, for certain values of wonderful, is that Stephanie is one of PublishAmerica’s authors. Some people are just not smart enough to be allowed to run loose on the Internet.

Here’s what I’m told AW requires of a new host: 100-150 Gigabytes per month in traffic, plus 2 Gigabytes more of space, plus running a very active webboard based on MySql and a bunch of scripts.

Meanwhile, I have frantic email from a friend who posts to AW and is trying to figure out how to find versions of the texts of her messages there so she can save them. Any suggestions will be gratefully appreciated.

As of right now, Absolute Write is being recompiled and should be up by tomorrow. But I think it’s important to document and spread the word on what Bauer is up to, in attempt to hide the scam she runs.

For those who don’t read Making Light, the list of the Twenty Worst can be found here. If you’re going to try to publish, it’s worth reading.