Apologies to all Mitchell reel collectors

I apologize to all Mitchell reel collectors for this site not being available. Someone has spitefully denied you this valuable information. Please bear with me, while I attempt to resolve this situation.

A little history

This site was first put online in 2016, after the original had been put offline by its hosts due to it containing one or more malicious pieces of software. Many will recall the virus warnings that Google Chrome reported to them.

The site had been neglected for about a year.

The site remained offline for months!

This site is a reconstruction of all that was lost. It amounts to several weeks of my time scouring web caches and attempting to rebuild the valuable information which had been lost.

On at least two further occasions, the original site was down for months each time.

Meanwhile, this site has sat here - fully known about - filling the gap, so to speak. It has never been down until now, and this is not for a technical reason.

A competent and responsible webmaster

This site has been secure from day one.

This site is backed up daily, both locally and remotely.

This site has never been compromised and has never served any malicious content.

This site has never "crashed". Has anyone ever heard of a website "crashing"? In my near 3 decades of experience, I have never seen or heard of this.

As a webmaster, one must keep on top of your traffic every single day in life. While the good may outweigh the bad, the bad can cause a lot of hassle. Every single day, bots (robots) test websites for vulnerabilities. Every day bots scour the web for snippets of your personal information, which can be sold. Every day, bots or bot farms attempt to put websites offline. Last, but not least, spambots are still prolific.

Statistics tell me that only 100-150 people are interested in Mitchell reels in any one day. One could not monetize content with that little traffic! So, there is some genuine interest out there, but not that many. Remember, many of these people are people that just have an old reel and want to make it fishable.

So, by inference, if you see more traffic than this, this is just bots, which have never been identified and blocked.

A responsible webmaster will also not allow or encourage you to post any personal information. This not only exposes you to risks, this attracts harvesters. These harvesters just eat up the server's resources, making it slow for genuine users... unless one throws money at a better server.

On occasion, I have had to fix sites. There is no good reason why any site cannot be either fixed within minutes or hours, and, if not, simply restored from the last backup.

How many of you live in Europe? Are you familiar with the General Data Protection Regulation (GRPR)? This site has no login, and, as such, is 100% GDPR compliant. If I allowed people to login, I would have to meet certain criteria, and perform certain duties.

It takes some skill and experience to vet any account registrations. Only genuine human beings should be approved. Any bots should be permanently blocked, to try to prevent them registering again. A human does not register from an IP address that traces back to a web server, unless they are using a proxy (rare) or a VPN (more common). There are other ways an applicant can be "tested" to see if it is human. Of course, not all humans are desirable, but that is a different story! :)

So, if I extrapolate from that, in my opinion, if the old site had 2,000 registrations, I would estimate that only 30-50 are genuine humans.


I would assume that you have several questions by now, including, but not limited to:

  • If the site has been compromised, what (of my) personal information did the cracker gain access to?
  • What action was taken to ensure that this does not recur?
  • Why was the site down?
  • Why was the site down for so long?
  • Where is the original data?
  • Why has the original data not been restored?
  • What is your backup procedure?
  • Why has this happened so many times?
  • Why are you always asking for money, when time and skills are the main thing necessary?
  • Why did you not seek my prior consent on other than strictly necessary cookies? (ePR)
  • Why did you not seek my prior consent on personal data? (GDPR)
  • Why is my personal data being transferred to and stored in a country not in the "adequate countries" list? (GDPR)
  • When was your last data backup?
  • When was your last files backup?
  • Where are these backups stored?
  • What happens if a certain set of backups is lost?
  • Why did you not just restore the site?
  • How do we know that you will not just disappear again?
  • What will happen if there is an issue with the website in the future?
  • What precautions have you taken in case something happens to you?

Whaaaa... What happened?

Okay, some of you will have no idea about the above. I am sorry that you have been affected this way and deprived of what you thought you would find here.

This site hosted an accumulated gold mine of information about Mitchell fishing reels dating back to April 12, 2009 or before. Multiple people created this content, some of whom may no longer be with us or others that are no longer interested. Many hours were spent gathering this. Nobody was ever asked for any money. The site was never monetized. This was my own time and paid for out of my own pocket.

Initially, it was created because a previous site had been neglected for at least a year, had become infected with malware and its responsible hosts put it offline, to prevent harm to any visitors. This pattern has repeated itself, making this site the only source of much of this information.

It's here for Mitchell reel collectors, fans and users.

It's existence was known about, and never caused any problems until recently.

I have never been angry that you’ve done this

So, you see? No problems... other than I had taken steps to prevent him from copying from my site.

I am not an unpaid backup system to make - or is that cover - up for his inadequacies. As already stated content was provided for the benefit of Mitchell reel owners worldwide. Let him answer up to people for what he has allowed to happen...

I really have no desire to have the responsibility of trying to protect and preserve all this amassed information... yet, there has been no other realistic option! I would willingly take it down, if someone had politely asked, and made it clear that there would be no loss to Mitchell reel collectors, either now, or in the future...

Anyhow, all went quiet and really nothing has happened. Then for reasons unknown I received an email from my hosts stating that Wallace W. Carney had issued them with a DMCA Takedown Notice, and they felt obliged to comply.

In brief, a claim has been made that WC is the rightful copyright holder of all of this site's former data.

This is simply not true.

  • Not all content can be copyrighted. e.g. facts, ideas, names and titles.
  • It's impossible for WC to be copyright holder of the bulk of the content. This may be copyright of someone else though, and WC has not been officially nominated as their agent.
  • WC would actually need to prove that he is the rightful copyright holder of anything.

In my opinion, the host has acted too hastily and reacted to a DMCA Notification being overly broad.

What am I saying?

I really do not care. If WC does happen to be copyright holder of the information on any page or part of a page, he can link to this and prove without doubt that he is copyright holder, I will be happy to remove that.

If it was you, sure! Just let me know and it will be done.

Why the fuss?

Honestly, I do not understand it. We can all have our opinions though.

What really bothers me is permanent loss of valuable historic data, and how this affects Mitchell reel collectors worldwide.

WC certainly does not seem to have any of this data. He certainly does not have copies of all the photos that I have restored.

This one act is affecting all Mitchell reel collectors, and frankly, that bothers me. I'm not even a fisherman, but I do have morals.

One can only guess why it may be so important. People seem to want to pay WC money for losing their website many times over? People can write asking for appraisals of what may be a rare reel, and WC would get first shot at it and name his price?

I can state one thing: I cannot and will not ever trust WC.

I will be updating this page with more detail, when time permits.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.