Gone but not forgotten: What websites or webrings do you miss?

I miss the website Animated Lust. It was a PG-rated site dedicated to all forms of animation, and the way it worked was you basically sent in a movie or a character and gushed about why you liked it, along with pictures. Before DVDs of classic shows, movies, or anime became widespread it could be the only way to find screenshots of things.

edited 12th Jul '17 12:20:20 AM by lalalei2001

Unlikely Heroes — not the nonprofit organization that rescues and rehabilitates child victims of sex slavery; the one I'm thinking of was a webcomic based on the characters people played in a roleplaying chatroom which was originally hosted by Wizards of the Coast. When they split off from WotC, a lot of archived stuff got lost, and a lot of players never made the switch. The webcomic is now gone in the sub-ether of cyberspace.

There were a lot of in-jokes, so if you weren't a regular on the original chat site, you probably wouldn't "get" a lot of the comics. But it was funny to those of us who were there.

edited 12th Jul '17 11:40:12 AM by pwiegle

I remember "Animated Lust" too.

There were a bunch of roadgeek/highway sites full of pictures from all over the country. A few of them are still around, and some are even still active, but a lot of them got wiped out when Xoom closed up.

American Country Countdown used to have a forum, which was instrumental in my musical discoveries around age 18 (year 2005). One user had a subscription to Billboard and would post the new chart every day he got it, so we didn't have to wait around. The forum got hacked, so we moved to another short lived forum and then to Pulse Music Boards, where we've been ever since.

I also miss The 9513, a short lived country music blog. Their reviewers were very opinionated blowhards, but it was fun to read how they would contrive their opinions. Some of their members moved to another site called Engine 145, but that later closed down too.

I miss a lot of the Yahoo! groups I used to converse on. Most of them were related to retail in some way. However, most of the fold has moved onto a series of Facebook groups.

Geocities in general. Had nice options alone.

Insidetheweb was a fun but very outdated Forum type. Held lots of fun games and discussions there. It came back for a while, but went down likely due to "who wants a forum that you can't edit your posts?". Game FA Qs has a similar issue, but it's more of a "you have a set time to do so". And you can at least ask for your posts to be removed anyway.

Live Journal, particularly back in the early 2000s when it seemed like all of my friends were using it. It's not quite gone at this point, but it started losing users after bradfitz sold it, and as far as I know most of the people I hung out with that dug the format went to places like Dreamwidth or Insane Journal. (Most of my friends ended up at Facebook or Twitter, though.)

edited 27th Aug '17 4:41:05 AM by lee4hmz

RIP, Postopia. I have fond memories of playing Waffle Boy's Mountain Adventure with my sister, even though we never got past Level 2.

Also, did anyone else visit the PBS Kids website around 2003 or so? I vaguely remember a game that involved a character saying "Look what I can do!" and then doing tricks on a trampoline. There were a bunch of other simple games, but my memories of them are even vaguer. The Boohbah Zone rings a bell, but that website seems to be defunct, too.

Bitstrips because they left when I was just starting to get interested in it. I don't want Bitmoji, I want Bitstrips back.

Edited by Mroh on Aug 10th 2019 at 4:06:46 AM

• There are a lot of online games I played throughout 2006-2011, but most weren't websites in themselves. Millsberry was one of the exceptions. It was one of the first websites I found on the internet.
• The site isn't dead yet but I worry one day that it will disappear: Sailor Nothing. It's one of my favorite Magical Girl stories and I'd genuinely buy a physical copy, but it's an old site from 1999. I'll probably print out a copy the story sometime.
• The Naruto Fanfiction Archive was my favorite website circa 2006 or 2007. I discovered it before Fanfiction Dot Net. I always loved the way it looked and how it separated its fics. I think it's still technically around, but last time I tried to check it (circa 2012-2015) Google gave me a warning that the site was risky.
• I worry about the state of online web games. Many kids use mobile devices more and software like Flash is becoming obsolete. Neopets is still thriving, but for how long?
• I don't know how I discovered it, but back circa 2006 I came across this very extensive Velma-themed Scooby Doo fan-site. I used to read it all the time. It probably still exists, but I'm warier of what websites I click on nowadays so I haven't checked.
• The main Naruto forum. It's not gone, but it's awfully dead. The manga discussion section was active when I checked four years ago, but the fan club section is a wasteland. Everyone must have left for Tumblr and Reddit.

'Not one site in particular, but I love those old fan-sites you'd see for specific anime or characters. I never understood how they worked but they were always so pretty. I can't remember any of them.

Edit:

I remember now. They were anime "fanlisting" sites. I loved looking at fanlisting sites. They always had the prettiest graphical designs.

Edited by Pichu-kun on Aug 16th 2019 at 7:40:36 AM

Concept.org was a great place to hang out with other artists,shame site drama killed it though

Also,Triumph 's forums for Ages of Wonders 3

Also,Filefront's forums

Fametracker, a spinoff of Television Without Pity that IIRC was more concerned with personalities and fame in general than just related to television.

Television Without Pity itself.

Regretsy, April Winchell's take on the bad, ugly, and tragicrafted offerings at Etsy.

The Malkovich Mediator, which would turn all the text on a page to "Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich," as in the scene in Being John Malkovich where the actor enters the portal into his own head and finds himself in a restaurant where everyone looks like him and every spoken or written word is "Malkovich."

Websites I played on as a kid. Like Funbrain and Kids Know It. Technically they're still around but too different to be the same.

I remember Funbrain! That's where I first learned abut Diary of a Wimpy Kid!

I was just trying to remember the name of that website! I miss Mighty Guy.

As weird as this sounds, I am going to miss Myspace as it was my first foray into social media....although I do not use it a lot nowadays anyway.

I am also going to miss a lot of anime fansites that I barely remember the name of. I still have the links.

I miss the anime fansites too.

I never got to use Myspace. Other kids in my class did, but I didn't because we were technically too young for it. It's a shame the site was so revamped. I had wanted to look at old Myspace pages a few years ago, only to realize the site was completely different now.

(x5) Coolmath Games and FunBrain were those two sites teachers always seemed to use. I don't know if teachers still use them. Nowadays I hear a lot about Kahoot but I have no clue what that is.

Edited by Pichu-kun on Aug 19th 2019 at 3:59:12 AM

Kahoot's a site where you make quizzes, and then people use a code to answer the questions with their cell phones/laptops. So teachers use it for things like reviewing for a test.

I also remember Coolmath in school a lot because it was unblocked and it was math so technically school related

Sounds like a hassle. What if I don't wanna use my cellphone at school? I'm guessing they use school computers then.

I didn't have a cell phone in high school, so the teacher used to lend me hers.

Club Penguin - Played it a lot back in 2009-mid 2012 if I recall quickly. RIP my pink princess castle igloo full of candy.

Also technically it still exists but it's a lot different to how it was when I was a kid - Roblox. I miss the roblox from 2011-2013, those were the funnest years. I joined in 2011 and the 2011-2013 era gave me the most fun memories. I still play Roblox but it's just not the same. I've been taking up LUA lately and plan to create games that give off an "old roblox" feel. Also, I have a few OCs based off Roblox games/ideas, for example I have an OC called Linzy who has a few personality traits of my younger self (eg: girly, wants to be a vet, etc), and she is based off this game called "Animal Cops" I used to play alot and it was made by a user called "Linzy 88", and yes that's how I got the name for my OC :)

Also I remember being obsessed with C4ing/flooding Personal Servers, helping my sister make this "Boat Ride' personal server and trapping Helperbot in Welcome to Roblox building... good times... the legendary "flying toilet glitch" and that time me and my brother went into a guest-themed personal server and I built a... "body part" onto this statue of a guest, then the thumbnail updated to show the guest statue with the "weener" in all its glory. Legendary times.

Oof, I went a bit TL;DR there...

Edited by Lunala on Aug 26th 2019 at 11:40:15 AM

I remember my Neopets days from 2007-09, which is just the first few years of 2.0, when they introduced the NC Mall. Being a kid back then, I was blind to the controversy surrounding it, but I had fun nonetheless. But ever since they were bought by JumpStart, the site now looks too different for me to go back...

From what I've heard, the community became... less than wholesome.

Edited by TroperNo9001 on Aug 27th 2019 at 6:13:58 PM

Neopets has looked that way since customization. i think.

I’ve been playing since before the customization update, but I’ve been playing less and less since Jumpstart took over. Back in the day, it was a marvel of programming, with constant new things to discover. Even the Viacom era had real updates every once in a while to make it worth the time. But now the whole thing is just soulless. I can give them credit for supposedly trying to update the whole thing to not need Flash, but the new games feel cheaply done, site events are literally half-finished, tie-in apps are a buggy mess, and a lot of what did work before broke with no one planning on fixing it.

Though even the best imaginable Neopets wouldn’t stand out against all the console games I’ve been playing recently anyway.

As a kid I didn't "get" games like Club Penguin. I made a Club Penguin account a few times, and similar accounts for other games like Habbo, but couldn't find anything to do because I didn't like talking to anyone. That's my gripe with MMOs: they can't easily be played solo.

Neopets was always annoying because I wanted so many Neopets but there was a limit on how many you could have. I ended up making so many accounts and then ignoring them after a week because I wanted something else. Neopets is probably my favorite of the "kid's online games" because you don't have to interact with people... Neopets has really good character designs. I hope it doesn't die anytime soon. At least we have the licensed games to remember it by.

> That's my gripe with MM Os: they can't easily be played solo

thats completely missing the point of a massive muliplayer game