Anyone else remember these old school website features?

Wonder how many of the clones still are though?

 

Webrings were pretty cool back in the day. I remember getting lost in them for hours at a time. Now I get lost on Wikipedia for hours at a time.

The forum rules of entry I definitely remember. Some 'slicker' webmasters had them in a scrolling box that you had to scroll to the bottom of before you could click accept. Back then though sources of information were limited so people put up with it. Nowadays, you can get pretty much the same information from numerous sources.

 

Topsites are still around to this day. One of the games that I work actually has a button for a top site on the footer. The site is called http://www.ppntop50.com/ then you also have http://www.apexwebgaming.com and http://www.topwebgames.com that drive traffic to online games. They've(Apex and TWG) have been around since 2006.

 

Oh sure, they'll still around. Technically everything on the list is, even the webrings.

It's just their usefulness has declined significantly.

 

Ya, they stopped generating as much traffic to people and a lot of sites were probably hit by some type of Google Update. So, a lot of people have stirred away from using them. I remember when using one of those sites, a game could have hundreds of members online at a given pace. Now? It's more like 10-100.

 

I was a HUGE user of Bravenet back in the day before I learnt how to host my own scripts.

 

Same here. Of course, when you realise all the great options for self hosted scripts that exist out there (and how poorly the Bravenet ones actually work as far as design, features and usability goes), you soon stop using anything by Bravenet.

 

After I wrote that I went to see if Bravenet is still around, very surprised to see that they are doing better than ever before!

 

They do well simply because they're well known, people know them as 'that place for free services', and a whole bunch of webmaster sites seem to refer people to them with no idea about their quality.

I mean, Lissa Explains (that web design for kids site) links to them a fair amount, so I suspect the complete newbies to website design end up going with them without looking around much.

Although given how free hosting has changed a lot since then (and given how Bravenet is literally the only 'free host' with both no server side scripting yet non web builder tools for posting content), I do have to wonder where people are using these copy and paste codes now.

 

Haha oh man this really brought me back. Those were NOT the days..

 

Amazing thread. Took me back!

 

WOW! I went back on time 14 years ago when I first came online to find countless sites that were truly awful such as blue texts over blue backgrounds just to name one.

Actually it's still possible find many of these sites not just through archive.org but live among the lycos free sites that survived.

And look at me, I was assiduous Lycos user and even had a web browser that they used to promote like the best next thing on earth; Neoplanet, which I must admit it has tons of great skins and a good channels concept behind it.

 

What about frames? Frames everywhere. Everything should be in a frame, nested in a frame, with frames inside!
Matryoshka dolls of frames.