THE THOMAS HARDY
ASSOCIATION
LINKS
DIRECTOR: ROBERT SCHWEIK
© 1998-2004
THOMAS HARDY ONLINE
DESCRIPTION:
Address: http://www.webuser.com/hardy/
Contact: Mike Richardson (rc@webuser.com)
Date:
05/01/04
As of 07/01/04, this site was named "Thomas Hardy Online" in a Hardy script typeface created by Mark Simons. Its parts at that time included such things as "Events," "Links," "Classifieds," "News," "Discussions," and the like. Its contents have varied widely over the years, as has its name. By 04/01/04 its format had again been changed. The typeface created by Mark Simons was no longer used, and it included such things as "An Introduction" which consisted of a copyrighted essay by Philip Allingham published on The Victorian Web (http://65.107.211.206/authors/hardy/intro.html) which was presented as of it were part of this Richardson site but was used without Allingham's permission or knowledge. Then, on 04/30/04, after protests from Philip Allingham, the text of his essay was removed and a link substituted. As of 04/30/04 this site also included eleven links to remote web pages and a notice that it was offering free a PDF eBook of 220 Hardy poems for downloading. Not surprisingly, that offer, too, involved a misrepresentation: the book it 'offered' was, in fact, the product of PoemHunter.Com (http://www.poemhunter.com/thomas-hardy/poet-3111 which Mike Richardson's Thomas Hardy Online offered without acknowledging its source.
COMMENT:
The brief history provided above is typical. Over its entire six-year existence, this site has repeatedly misrepresented materials originating at other sites as its own, and no information has ever been provided about the qualifications of the master. It is a gross understatement to say that the past conduct of the master of this site, Mike Richardson, does not inspire confidence. Originally called the "Thomas Hardy Society," after protests from
the UK Thomas Hardy Society its name was changed to "A Thomas Hardy Website," and then to
"Thomas Hardy On-line Society." These sites were riddled with illiteracies and, in spite of the word "society" in two of its previous names, they have never represented any bona fide Thomas Hardy society. Similarly disquieting, visitors to the site were invited to subscribe to a "newsletter" and were assured they would be e-mailed an issue quarterly. But no newsletter appeared, and the offer to subscribe was silently removed from the site, though claims were made of large numbers of subscribers. Those claims, too, may be doubted: on 05/27/98, for example, the opening page carried, in otherwise identical contexts, two conflicting statements about the current number of subscribers. By 04/03/03 the site name had again been changed, this time to "Thomas Hardy," with a reproduction of a Thomas Hardy signature against a background of part of the text of a Hardy letter that was taken from the logo of Mark Simon's The Thomas Hardy Resource Library with no attribution or indiciation that it was used with permission. On 04/05/03, after the master was told of that, the site name was once again changed to "Thomas Hardy Online" and the Mark Simon logo removed. But on that date the illiteracies, misinformation, and misapropriation of material on the site remained. For example, a short biographical sketch headed "Be Inspired" included the misinformation that Hardy wrote a novel titled Under the Milkwood Tree. In fact, that biographical sketch, including the misinformation, was copied from a web site titled "Outdoor Britain" whose URL is http://www.visitbritain.com/uk/outdoorbritain/get_inspired/poets_authors/hardy.htm. This is a copyrighted site whose text was appropriated without attribution or statement of permission. Probably a "About Us" section, including the oddly punctuated, spelled, and capitalized sentence "We are based in pundbury, dorchester dorset," can with some certainty be attributed to the site master. But here, too, there was a problem: on 04/05/03 the "pundbury" link was inoperable. These are typical of the extensive kinds of errors, unauthorized appropriations of texts, and illiteracies noted in evaluations of earlier versions of this site--for an example of which click here.
The master will, of course, as soon as he learns of these comments, revise his site accordingly, so what is mentioned above may not appear on the site as you see it. But--if its six-year history is any warrant--in time other similarly egregious errors in fact and in language will certainly appear in anything which can confidently be attributed to the site master as opposed to what may be linked or simply taken without attribution from other sites--and, even then, there can be sound reasons for doubting his judgment.
In short, the history of this site--its replications of copyrighted texts without permission (and sometimes with grotesque errors), its illiteracies, and its factual errors over a period of six years--does not suggest that this site will likely be of any value for anyone seeking reliable information about Hardy.
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