I presume the other site is afraid that coffee shop is becoming the number one site about railway issues.
Its a shame really,as I thought that ALL rail sites were about improving issues about OUR railway.
It has really changed over the years - not just in rail but in general. I was an early adopter of the internet, with news groups and email and early use of gopher which was overtaken by the web with hypertext transfer protocol.
In the early days, people found it hard to be comfortable making their content freely available - they were nervous and preferred not to have people linking in from outside. The web was a way for the Bromley and District Commuters Association to communicate with their members, and there was a reluctance to let there be access outside their known visitors. Links in from elsewhere were distinctly unwelcome, and if found would result in an email asking for them to be removed.
With an ongoing sophistication including things like log in processes to sites and cookies adding "state" to visits, it became first possible and then commonplace for sites to be able to be selective as to where people arrived and where they arrived from, and the requests to delete links have long since gone away. But we are perhaps past the peak of free data for all, with paywalls charging for access.
I can understand and appreciate site owners not wanting content - including public content - copied in quantity onto other sites. They want that asset of content to bring people to their site and read other content and click through adverts to generate income which helps pay the cost of the provision of the data in the first place. They also want to ensure that their data is current - the web is a maze of dynamic documents and copies are merely a snapshot in time ... and for this reason, yes, it's in the interest of all parties that links and a chunk of words around them to give people an idea of what they're going to see (perhaps a short quote) has become the sensible standard.
