Well, that's not good...

[przed]

I just got an email from someone about one of my Wild Wild West stories. And not in a good way.

The main reason I love writing Wild Wild West is that I get to indulge my love of historical research. I usually find something interesting that happened somewhere between 1860 and 1875, research it to death, throw Jim, Artie and sex into the mix and watch what happens.

Problem is, someone just found my WWW Civil War story when they were Googling the real event it's based on. I'm sure James West and Artemus Gordon having sex wasn't quite what they were expecting.

So now I'm not sure what to do. Search and replace the names of historical figures in all my WWW stories? Add pop-up disclaimers to all stories? Say fuck it and let the chips fall where they may? (I'm tired enough at the moment that the last alternative is looking the most attractive, but I'll problem look to come up with some way of covering my ass sometime in the future.)

Comments

[sooguy.livejournal.com]

Ouch. I can see how that could be a problem. I sometimes get the weirdest google hits on my site based on odd combinations of words people are searching on.

Where are your stories hosted? Is it possible to put some sort of obvious disclaimer on the site? I know for google image searches there are different modes - Safe/Moderate/None. I don't recall if there are similar options in word searches, but if there are then I say let the chips fall where they may. Its up to people to filter out what they are looking for.

I know its distrubing to think that some student might be accidentally reading your material, but its bound to happen.

I remember my own father mentioning that www.whitehouse.com has nothing to do with Washington D.C. and the President. It's searcher beware.

Hope you find some solution that you can live with. I'd hate to think it might affect your writing or online publishing of stories.

[przed.livejournal.com]

I've got disclaimers on the main page, and the RPS page gets its own set of disclaimers, but I think I'm going to go with disclaimers on every story. Or I will when I get around to putting them up.

Sigh.