Internet Archaeology: Behold the Most Hilarious Abandoned Websites

[Jazzy]

For every new website that goes up, there are some like these that get lost or forgotten – along with a sense of what online culture used to look like. We may have faster network speeds and better web features now, but – like finding an old mixtape (yes, on actual cassette tape) – finding a webpage dating back to the turn of the century is like unearthing King Tut’s tomb.

And there’s something about those artifacts that’s worth preserving, whether it’s a promo site for the 1996 film Space Jam (above) full of twinkling-little-stars backdrop and spinning GIFs, a virtual “mall” promoting Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, or a collection of (now-nearly-obsolete) “Enter” pages. Some of these gems are easy to find, but others are not, and there’s always a chance that some may disappear from the web forever and while the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has logs of more than 240 billion pages and counting, but it probably can’t save everything.

In 2009, fearing that the web would lose a lot of great Flash-based pages – particularly with Yahoo’s shuttering of GeoCities – Ryder Ripps began archiving a lot of the best images from his favorite sites. Dubbed the “Indiana Jones of the internet” he set up Internet Archaeology and began archiving hundreds of images with the intent to “explore, recover, archive and showcase the graphic artifacts found within earlier Internet Culture.” As Ripps and his fellow internet archaeologists see it, web culture is just as important as any album, painting, film, or other cultural artifact and its preservation is essential to chronicling the birth of internet culture – as much for the historical record as for the creative one.

Article contains links to abandoned Websites

 

[DrLeftover]

How much do you want to bet at least a couple of those "abandoned" websites have pages that are/were mine?

I had 'feeder pages' on Geocites, MyFreeWebspace, Tripod, and a couple of others.

Most haven't been touched in... ten years or more.

 

[Evil Eye]

The odds should be in your favour there.

You know, I'm quite happy sites don't have animated gifs for backgrounds any more.

 

[DrLeftover]

Agreed.

I also HATE sites that have blasting soundtracks that you can't turn off, either that or talking ads (CNN was good at that trick for awhile)....

Speaking of ads, Yahoo has had this thing for force loading layered ads that MUST run their course over their entire portal page before anything else will work, and if you click the "x" button on the ad, it takes you to the sponsors page. Lovely that, no? (and then they wonder why they ended up in bankruptcy)...

Then there's the ones that use some sort of script to turn off your 'back button' in the browser so you can't easily leave....

Those that insist on opening internal pages in either new windows or tabs instead of just going to a new page....

Sites that have predetermined how large my screen is and what resolution my monitor is at so I either can't see the entire page because they think I have a wall sized monitor, or, it comes in and is only six inches wide and I have to try to zoom in to read something....

WARNING: our site uses 'cookies'. cookies must be enabled in your browser for our site to work correctly. ....(where's that back button?)....

and then you have Popups. My God, I thought that fad had ended.

 

[Evil Eye]

A very nice list of bad site design.

WARNING: our site uses 'cookies'. cookies must be enabled in your browser for our site to work correctly. ....(where's that back button?)....

I hate that new law. Worst part is when you try to decline and it sets a cookie saying you declined and then reloads the page, making the message pop up again because I'm blocking cookies.