3 ms·
Well, some things don't change. Back then we had a ton of misinformation on poorly done personal home pages and fan sites, now have a ton of misinformation in p
by CM30 10y ago
Well, some things don't change. Back then we had a ton of misinformation on poorly done personal home pages and fan sites, now have a ton of misinformation in poorly done news articles and social media posts.
Always fun to look and see which of the 226 different ways to get Mew a Pokemon site would post, or which of the equally large number of ways to get the Triforce in Ocarina of Time you'd see on a Zelda site.
Topsites were another big thing there too. Bit like webrings, except clicking on the button would vote the site you're on up the rankings and make it more likely to appear on others. These fell apart about as quickly as webrings did, especially when people gamed the hell out of them.
There was also:
Awkward Javascript animated objects moving around with the mouse cursor. Those were pretty big at one point.
The inevitable blink tags, which got so annoying that browsers dropped all support for them.
Jokey 'I agree to proceed to this site' splash pages, where the other link would send you to Google. Or perhaps something like the Barbie website.
Sites hotlinking to images and resources on other sites. Which then made a comeback for a while on Myspace, and still remains a large issue on internet forums. Bonus points if the original webmaster got so annoyed with the bandwidth costs, he replaced the image link with a porn picture instead.
Various awkward ways to try and 'block' right clicking, as if this could 'protect' the content from thieves.
Songs or sound effects playing in the background, which usually gave you quite a shock if you speakers were up and you moved to another site:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1BJVN8zD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM1BJVN8zD0
Various extremely basic HTML tutorials that basically said how to add bold text, italic text, underlined text, images and links.
Javascript used for 'password protection' (in the slightly later days). You can probably guess why this wasn't the best idea in the world.
Oh, and fanlistings. Where you had a big old list of people who liked something (a series, a game, a celebrity, a band, etc), and you could send an email with a name and contact address to be added to it.
It was certainly a different era then, though a surprising amount of stuff common then is actually still around. For example, this site still seems to offer webrings:
http://www.webringworld.org/ http://www.webringworld.org/
And sites like Bravenet still offer everything that was popular in 1996 or so.
- kayamon 10y agoI really did try to find an active webring while writing the article, but there aren't any. webringworld.org doesn't actually offer any real services.