Personal Web Pages

[mmanning]

Help!!! Wow. I am flummoxed. Ok, after much Chat with a specialist, >1hr online, and phone time with specialists my old pages are still up. I tried to turn them 'Off' in the appropriate place but they are still being served by Comcast and come up in searches. Am I missing something? Please help me as my work has a new home and the old pages coming up are very confusing for clients. Thanks, Michael.

[boogeyman1954]

Use a program called Coreftp free. Go into your server that way and delete the files.

[mmanning]

I don't know how to access the files either. So turning 'Off' the pages doesn't work then? How do i access the files? I see no link or info on that. This page is about 6 or 7 years old at this point. It is located here:

http://home.comcast.net/~michael.manning5/home.htm

[Again]

https://publish.comcast.net  Click on that link.  On the page that opens up, click on View & Manage Files.  Click on a file and when the box pops up [make sure you don't have popups blocked in your browser] click on Move to Trash.  You will have to do that with every file.

[mmanning]

I don't have any option like 'View and manage files' at that link. My pages are listed as 'Off' though, even though they are still up. Do i need to turn them 'On' in order to see the link you sent?

[mmanning]

Okay, I am in. Is that the only way to do this? Why doesn't the 'Off' choice work? It has been 'Off' for several days so plenty of time for the servers to implement the changhe, no?

[Again]

Off only means your webpages aren't enabled to edit them.  Your pages, however, stay on the server.

[BethKatz]

Nothing that has been posted online really goes away. It may be hard to find specific items, but you can't be sure things disappear.

In the case of pages created with the Comcast page building tools, you can't access them through FTP. You need to delete them individually using the Comcast tools. It makes sense that turning them OFF should make them not be served. But it's possible that won't work. They might be cached in various places. I trust you refreshed your web browser.

[mmanning]

well so this something completely different which I hadn't heard yet. There is NO way to turn the page off so that it is no longer a website served by the server? Or for me to remove the page? What if i was no longer a customer, would the page still be there? There must be a way to remove the site, that is what I am asking. 

So to be clear 'Off' is not off? In that case it wouldn't matter whether my browser cache was cleared or not. The site is still up. 

I don't understand why tech support can't remove my pages? 

[BethKatz]

My comment was more about the general nature of the internet. For example, I can look at web.archive.org and see my Comcast pages as they appeared June 24, 2007.

Your page has been captured 12 times by the Wayback machine between August 2003 and February 2005. See http://web.archive.org/web/20050210000013/http://home.comcast.net/~michael.manning5/ As far as I know, you can't make those pages go away.

But what that also tells me is that your page is not created with the current Comcast tools. You'll need to use the File Manager (the View and Manage Files) part. Or use a third-party FTP program (as boogeyman above mentioned).

If you delete the index.html and home.html files, the pages will be less accessible. Deleting everything would be better. In addition, putting up a simple index.html page noting your new web site would be even better.

You CAN delete the pages and they won't be served by the Comcast server. But web browsers and caches around the web may have copies they will serve for a while.

I didn't realize that just turning off the pages didn't turn off the Comcast server serving the pages. I don't want to experiment with that on my pages.

[mmanning]

Right. I understand all of that. I'm saying that there has to be a way to remove the files, remove the site. Not so that is is more difficult to find but so that it does not exist any longer. Of course there are caches and snapshots of the web. A site has to be served by servers when requested but not if it doesn't exist. I simply want to remove the site. And Comcast should have the ability to do that really easily. Having a site that redirects to another site is not the solution I'm looking for. This is pretty basic. 

[mmanning]

I will try removing the files, one by one, to see what happens. But it seems Comcast should have a simple way to do this. It's a bit disappointing that this much time and effort has gone into removing a personal page.

[BethKatz]

The Comcast personal web pages are not supported anymore. There aren't connections to the tools from the main Comcast site. Most of the reps have no idea how to make them work. Getting something technical done with them on Comcast's side takes days.

Do you have your pages turned off or on right now? I agree that turning them off should turn the serving off. I'm surprised that it didn't.

It looks like you started a page with the Comcast. It will show when you delete the index.html and its kin. It will also show if you save that page. If it were my pages, I'd at least put some real contact info there; edit the page you see at https://publish.comcast.net/pages/editor/0/ and save it. Then turn off the pages again under your account.

Edit: You can also adjust some of the info at https://publish.comcast.net/home/

I'd also delete the index.html file using the File Manager tool. Also delete any index.htm or home.html. All of those seem to be there for your pages.

Yes, it should be easy, but Comcast doesn't care about this feature. I'm a customer like you.