What do you find hidden?

This is directed at those of you who design or maintain sites for other people, especially those of you who didn't build the site, but were brought onboard at a later date to make changes or take over maintainence.

I'm very curious as to how often you come across 'inappropriate' material hidden away on webspace?

In my mind, if I (personally) register a domain name and purchase webhosting for my own personal website or independant project, then I have the right to store whatever I like (within legal reason) there.

If I am part of a group or have been asked by someone else to register a domain name and purchase webhosting for their project (or 'our' project if I have a personal interest in it) and build a site to go with it, that doesn't give me the right to store unrelated files on the webspace.

I have just realised that I am now 3/3 for finding web designers hosting unrelated material on websites that are not their own personal sandbox.

Most of my 'webmaster' related activity in the past couple of years has been helping people (who know nothing about the internet) to register a domain name and purchase webhosting applicable for the site they would like to have built. I've also been asked to build websites for some of them, and then I have been informed that whoever is funding the website has insisted that the project will not be funded unless the web designer has a formal qualification in web design. In other words, either I work for free or they get someone else.

In most cases, a few months after the site has been built by someone else, they get back in touch with me. (Usually because they discover their funding covered the cost of the site being built and not the cost of the site being updated.) So I then help out (for a fee) with maintaining the existing website.

Three times I've been asked to make updates to existing sites. Three times I've logged in on someone else's web space and found 'interesting' things.

The first one, I logged in and found a folder of amateur porn hidden away amidst the history of the town.

The second one was for a project I have a personal interest in. The domain name and hosting are registered to me, but someone else volunteered to design the site - which was fine with everyone. Recently, I was alerted that the site appeared to have been hacked, I launched FTP to find out how much damage had been done and discovered the site hadn't been hacked at all. The person maintaining the site had made an error... he uploaded a file into the wrong folder. No big deal right? Except the folder he meant to upload it into contained a full website which was selling used cars. And then I found another folder with ANOTHER website which 1) no one had ever heard of and 2) was in direct conflict of interest with the project that the webspace was bought for! :blech: At least this explained why I'd been asked to upgrade the hosting package. When questioned, he said 'I was only testing to see if they worked!' Funny that the domain names were re-directing to MY webspace then....

And now today... I was asked over a year ago to buy a domain and webspace and build a site for a local community group hosting an annual event. They had funding problems as described above, and they had to hire a professional web designer to build the site. The details for this year's event haven't been set in stone, so they've asked me to create a holding page with basic information about the event until they can re-launch the site with all of the final details. They've given me the text information, but no graphics, so I asked if I could log into their webhosting and see what images were available to be used. They agreed, so I logged in this morning to look for images. I haven't found anything terribly untoward, except for an entire series of webpages (in addition to existing Flash based web site) which are named 'f***off1.htm' 'f***off2.htm', etc. Obviously curiosity got the best of me and I visited the pages. I was relieved to find that other than the inappropriate filenames and titles, the pages weren't defamatory. But I have to ask... would you dare? If you were getting paid 4 figures as a professional building a website for someone else, would you name your test pages 'f***off'? And even if you did - would you leave them on the webspace after the site had launched?

I'm feeling really disillusioned at the moment. Three different websites, three different groups, three different designers... and this kind of crap is happening on all of them. Is this the 'professional standard' that I keep losing work to?