Anyone else remember these old school website features?

And boy, these are old school features. Indeed, they're some of the things that were kind of hot in the early 00s but seemingly vanished off the face of the internet a couple of years later. They were everyone too.

So here's the list:

Forum Rules/Terms Pages On Entry

You know the ones. You'd click on the link for 'forums' then get presented with a giant block of text which happens to list every single point in the forum terms and conditions along with tiny 'I agree let me in' and 'Get me out of here' style links hidden at the way at the bottom. Like this:


Or this:


Of course, this was probably a pretty bad thing for your forum's traffic (90% of people online won't stay on the page to read about 22 paragraphs of rules and netiquette before finding the forum entrance link), but still, I remember that nearly everyone did it at one point.

Offering Hosting

Another thing it seems old websites used to do that they don't any more is offer webhosting, even if they're not at all actually a webhosting company.

Some even went far enough to have little plans drawn out with different amounts of disc space and bandwidth in each:



While most just had one plan with mostly unlimited features and various other things:


But either way, I swear almost everyone was offering hosting at one point. I mean, every big fan site about every possible niche seemed to have a nice neat 'hosting' link in the sidebar and a page full of terms and conditions and features and other things for a service, along with some attempt to build a network.

Unfortunately, I think the increasing space and complexity needs of a website kind of killed off this sort of thing, as well as a general move towards people running sites like a purely monetary business with no real interest in the community.

Webrings and Topsites

Which again, it seemed every big site had at one point in time. And you couldn't go four feet without running into a plea to 'vote for us at this address'!

SEO kind of killed off these. Or maybe it was just Google becoming more prominent, who knows.

Free email accounts

I also remember seeing a bunch of completely unrelated sites offering free email hosting for whatever strange reason, usually with some boast that 'you get 10MB disc space!' or some other now pathetic boast of that type.


I think free email services in general kind of killed these off. Or maybe just the increasing risk of spam from nogooders interested in trying to give your site a bad reputation. But they were everywhere at one point in time!

So does anyone else remember these kinds of features, and how they used to be super common on sites in the early 00s? Heck, does anyone else kind of miss the community feel of a lot of websites in that era (especially compared to the somewhat bland news sites and blogs that seem to exist now)?

 

Man I remember when nearly every site I visited would have at least one top site buttons on their site, do they even exist these days?

 

Technically, some topsites still exist. They're hard to find now though.

Some scripts exist for those who want to open one:

http://visiolist.com/

http://www.aardvarktopsitesphp.com/

 

Of course I remember old good times...

Despite being written in various programing languages, our corpo web also have buttons that sends users to the top of viewed page.....

@Author - I will not quote your msg because its long. All I want to say that there is nothing bad in putting (in any form - either as a 'starter' to another page or as a link somewhere (footer, header etc)) site rules on your site.

 

Of course there's nothing wrong with putting a link to site rules on your page. It's just a long time ago, EVERY link to the forum went to the rules page rather than directly to the forum one, so you had to click through these rules on every single visit (if you didn't directly bookmark the forum itself).

 

@pixelek the top sites they are referring to is like a list of links that got votes for being on top.

the top site link you are referring to is the button at the bottom of the page that takes you back to the top, that is a very important button and should be on all sites that have long pages.

 

I misunderstood that than it happens sorry for that

 

How come nobody didn't mention the one million pixel websites

Code:

http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

God, I hated those.

 

That thing is still up?

 

Remember when all you had to know was HTML?

http://mytrailerpark.com/

 

Back in the day I was a big fan of Ultimate Topsites. I just had a look for the site and the top site lists are still there! But the amount of ads they are displaying is crazy.

It certainly is, but I don't know how many of the ads actually link to active sites anymore.

Man, I hated Alex Tew for years because of the amount of copy cat sites that spawned the internet because of him.

 

Well, he made a million bucks though.

Actually I think my old vBulletin Modder site is on there. I'm not sure if I ever put my gaming site on there.

 

If you like to watch old web sites, use the WayBack Machine.... http://archive.org/web/web.php

 

How about those webrings? Remember those?

Scott

 

Ah yeah, webrings. I remember those, although they were kind of falling out of fashion even when I was first starting websites.

Million pixel home pages too. Yeah, those were kind of sad to be honest.

 

Haha, these old website features bring back some good memories. Even though they bring back memories, I sure as heck love how websites are developing today!

 

Didn't the first guy to do that, or at least the first guy to get it popular, become a millionaire from doing that? I wish I'd have thought of it. What a stupid idea, but it paid off for him.

 

Yes. I wasn't really referring to him though, more the hundreds that copied the idea and failed miserably at doing so. None of those ever made anywhere close to a million dollars.

 

Yeah, the idea was novel at the time. But gimmicky ideas, no matter how novel they are, are still gimmicky ideas and they always lose attractiveness quickly, especially when they have no real use.

Scott

 

I'll tell you what though. He was original and he kept his word. It's still online today.