There was an incredible site online at lasvegasstriphistory.com . The site had hundreds and hundreds of pages about the history of the Las Vegas Strip. Included were thousands of photos of the casinos on the Strip, many of them were rare. The site was provided by Deanna Di Matteo, with many other people having contributed scans and photos. I spent hours and hours learning from the site.

One day I went to the site and found that all of the photos had been changed from beautiful to ugly. Using a photo from our collection, I did a similar transition, as an example.

The photo would have looked like this...

All of the photos were altered, similar to this...

Deanna had added a page to the site explaining that she'd altered the photos because people kept stealing, not only the photos, but the ENTIRE WEBSITE! Yes...she said that her entire website had been stolen TWICE! The only way she could protect it was to make it ugly.

The site is gone now...

Today I found this page on the web...apparently this person copied her history for The Dunes, all 121 pages...I add it here so that you can see what an amazing resource has been lost to the collecting community.

https://genomunari.com/deanna-di-matteo/

If people continue to mis-use the resources of The Chip Guide, the same thing could happen to our site. I'm guessing that the next step would be to make the pictures ugly...and hope that the site doesn't disappear.

Some of you may not like the approach that Charles takes, when he's protecting our site...but it sure beats losing the site. Everyone, please thank the hundreds (or thousands) of people who have contributed to our site. Thank our administrators who volunteer hundreds (more like thousands) of hours of their time. And Thank Charles Kaplan for his dedication in keeping our site OURS!

Thanks for reading my rant...