Welcome

Read about the community history, development, structure and leadership, and future planning, or apply for membership or the Vienna Award.

The Vienna (virtual) Community began at Geocities.com back in the mid 1990's. The physical organization was that of Neighborhoods, Suburbs, and addresses. The host, Geocities.com, had neighborhood homepages and directories, had volunteer 'community leaders' who assisted their constituency with any problems they might have, bulletin boards where 'homesteaders' could communicate and post messages about their community interests.

By early 2000 Yahoo! had acquired Geocities, changed the indexing scheme, removed all the community homepages and directories, and eliminated the community leaders. In response, a Yahoo! Group was created, the Vienna Residents Club, which was composed of former Vienna community leaders and serious, concerned residents, who strove to keep the community going despite its lack of visibility in Yahoo!/Geocities. And did a good job of it, for a while.

Frustrated by the continual eroding of Geocities by Yahoo! 'improvements', many homesteaders packed up their sites and left for more amenable hosts. The Vienna Residents Club, the only vestige of Geo/Vienna organization left, had by this time thrown open the doors to membership outside of Geocities. Many of these former Geocities residents continued to exercise their influence in the group, as did new members that had never been in Geocities.

Still, increasing economic pressures in the real world and disinterest in the virtual world continued to weaken the community. Then came the final blow: in 2009 Yahoo! announced its intention to close Geocities. Millions of files, thousands of sites, would be lost forever.

But then, what amounts to a small miracle happened: several concerned individuals and organizations felt that the loss of Geocities would be too tragic to contemplate. They put together archives, databases, and all the necessary scripting to automatically download as much of Geocities as possible in the limited time available. A truly amazing amount was saved, although not all.

Geocities.ws, one of those organizations, elected to offer former Geocities residents the opportunity to reclaim and rebuild their sites. In 2011, Bill (The PinWiz) Kibler, your humble editor, (Vienna/Strasse/6809), discovered Geocities.ws and began to rebuild his site. Not knowing when to stop, he then made an attempt at rebuilding the Vienna directory and homepage, and began listing many of the memorable sites from the old virtual Vienna Community.

Now even though many of the old sites are lost or broken, he plans to continue to add Geo/Vienna sites to the directory, until he has listed all the ones that do in fact suit the Vienna Community Criteria. Several sites from outside have already expressed interest in joining this community, and it is hoped that many more will follow.

In olden days Geocities controlled censorship of the content, according to their standards, which were fairly liberal. Beyond that, as at most Web hosts, a homesteader was free to do pretty much anything he wanted to. What evolved in Vienna, and most Geocities neighborhoods, was an epiphenomenon, or faction, if you will, a voluntary society of individuals coming together to publicly proclaim their common interests and accomplishments within the framework of the established structure.

In a giant leap of faith (or perhaps hubris) Bill the PinWiz is inviting anyone interested in recreating this Vienna Community to join with him, and to contribute their thoughts, opinions, and even efforts toward this goal. To that end the following societal structure is proposed as a sort of provisional constitution, to be known as The Rules:

1) Decision-making powers reside in the Assembly, which consists of all the members or homesteaders in debate achieving a consensus opinion, through public vote in a forum, email list, blog, or other process yet to be established. No attempt will be made to rule the homesteaders, the decisions made will merely affect community policy, standards, and appointment of committees and councilors who will accomplish the day-to-day tasks determined to be needful by the community. During formal deliberation the members are expected to observe the utmost courtesy and respect toward their fellow members.

2) The day-to-day work of maintaining the community will fall to the Residents' Council and committees thereof, who will be appointed by, and responsible to, the Assembly. Councilors will be chosen by acclamation of the membership, after perusal of the credentials of the candidate. Councilors will have no set term of office; once elected, a Councilor will continue until retirement or deposition by the Assembly. The Councilors direct influence over other homesteaders will be limited to suggestion only. Any decisions binding on the group must be approved by a consensus of the membership.

3) All public policy, including the above, is and will ever be subject to the will of the Assembly. Dissenters from the consensus will not be discouraged, but rather encouraged to air their discontent in the hopes that the community will improve thereby.

4) The individual homesteaders must be responsible for complying with the rules and regulations of their Webhost. Councilors will not police the homesteads for infractions of this kind.

5) In applying for membership the applicant agrees to these rules. Non-compliance is subject to censure in the Assembly; in extreme cases the Assembly may elect to withdraw membership from the offender, subject to a 2/3 consensus.

The admistrator of this website, the administrators of Geocities.ws, and the members of the Vienna Community, having no control over the content of their members, and the further links they may have on their pages, accept no responsibility for that content. However, if serious offenses against accepted community standards are discovered they should be discussed in the Assembly to help establish those standards and what the official policy and response should be.

Persons/sites wishing to join the community and/or apply for the Vienna Award should send email to:
(Enter the mail address shown in the image into your mail client.)

Please put 'Vienna Resident' in the subject line.

Application for the Vienna Award assumes membership in the Vienna Community is desired also, as does applying for membership in the Vienna community Webring. Applying for either will automatically be considered an application to be listed in the directory. The listing will direct visitors to your site, movement or relocation of your pages is not needed or required.

In your message include your name, any nickname, cognomen, username or Webname you would prefer to be known by, and the URL to your site. If your homepage does not present content meeting the criteria below, be sure to specify which of your pages do. Also include which 'neighborhood' you wish to belong to. (default is 'Vienna') Your application will be processed as quickly as possible.

Sites with an historical number, such as Strasse/6809, will automatically be placed into that neighborhood. Homesteaders wishing to change their neighborhood listing, or description should also contact The PinWiz.

Your site will be subject to a Site Evaluation. We require that the site applying for membership be tasteful, suitable for general audiences, and have content that relates strongly to our community's theme, which is 'Classical' or 'art' music, opera, dance, or art or historic information relating to Vienna especially "classical Vienna." It should have no inappropriate, obscene, lewd, or hateful content, etc.

All links between elements of the pages, images, sounds, etc. should function. If a file is missing for one reason or another, the link should be removed or "remarked out" until the file is available. All links between pages in the site should function. A link to a "stub" page with an "under construction" message is (barely) acceptable, but a "not found" error response will not pass. This does not include links to external sites, although an excessive amount of broken links will need to be corrected.

Try to avoid browser-dependent tags like <blink> and <marquee>, and avoid "cutting edge" effects that require downloading specific browsers or plug-ins.

Presentation, pleasing, readable,etc. - you should check very thoroughly for spelling and grammatical errors, and avoid "chat"-type abbreviations such as "ur" for "your" and such. If you must use background images, give some thought, or better yet, test, to see how your images look when presented to browsers with different width settings. When using a background image, always set the background color to a similar color as your background tile, and make sure your text color is readable over it. Try to design your pages so as to allow your readers to not have to scroll sideways to read your pages, if they happen be using a smaller window width than the one you used when laying out your page. You should make an effort to have an effective navigation system also.

Note that these are also the criteria for the Vienna Award. Application for the award assumes membership in the Vienna Community and should follow the same process. You may apply for membership and the award simultaneously. The Vienna Award, however, is given to those sites 'a cut above' the average site, so it is possible to gain membership without receiving the award.

We don't intend to withhold the award (or membership) just because we don't like the site, on the other hand, even if we really find the site entertaining and useful the award will not be given if there are offenses against the other criteria. We will give our own personal opinions by return email, if needed, in the hope that what we have to say might inspire the applicant to improvement, if possible, or to heap praise onto the applicant, if we feel that's appropriate.

Whenever we decline to present the award, we will always respond with comments based on these criteria. Applicants are encouraged to respond, to seek dialog with us about the problems we have found. We are always willing to find time to answer any questions and help as we may to get your difficulties resolved.

If you have made an application, and not had a reply, be assured that we will get to you as soon as we can. We may get a little behind from time to time, but you are always welcome to send a message to us to check on your status, if you desire reassurance.

If you, dear reader, have a site that you believe would meet our requirements please feel most welcome to apply. Rest assured that if for some reason you don't qualify we won't hold you up publicly as an example of what not to do, but will instead point out to you privately what we see as shortcomings, and offer suggestions to help perfect your site.

During the years of its existence, The Vienna Award progressed from an individual's acknowledgment of website excellence to a symbol of the excellence of the entire community, a symbol of the standards toward which we all strive. The criteria above are quoted from the Vienna Online Ezine, the community news legacy page: Visiting Vienna May/2011. As this is a legacy page, few offsite links and mailtos work, but the site links are amazingly intact. Browse around, not only the Visiting Vienna pages, but follow the link to the Archived Articles too, and see what our community had to offer.

Go back and read the history of the Vienna Community.

Bill Kibler (The PinWiz) is a pinball wizard, a MIDI orchestrator, and a classically trained musician, who began building his site in Vienna in January 1998.

Any pertinent or entertaining emails about membership, the Vienna Award, or the Vienna Community in general will be posted here, at least until a forum is established, so don't say anything in public you wouldn't want your mother to hear. By sending mail to The PinWiz you agree to have it posted to public view.

Please put 'Vienna Resident' in the subject line.

The rebirth of virtual Vienna is underway.

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