The Old School Otaku Lounge

Do you remember those dumb webrings from the mid-'90s that connected anime fan pages together? If you had a page on something like Sailor Moon or whatever, there would be a Sailor Moon ring that would have links to other such pages, and in theory they would connect all of these pages together.

They seemed to work alright, but the problem was that there were way too many of them. I didn't understand the point of having multiple different webrings that essentially accomplished the same thing. Of course, this was back in the heyday of Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod when people would make really terrible homepages (here's a spoof page I made at the time). Then everything went to MySpace (which also allowed for terrible designs), and now Facebook (which admittedly makes everything look the same and people's idiocy isn't as immediately recognizable as a result).

Yep, I totally remember!

I did a short google search and found these:

http://webspace.webring.com/people/va/a ... nginfo.htm

http://webspace.webring.com/people/pu/um_12300/

I remember those kinds of pictures and links. The second link also shows something else that I remember quite well, which is how in the 90's people would just paste text onto images, and the text would look so out of place and be terribly difficult to read as well.

Did you like looking through any webrings in particular? Were you a part of any webrings?


I like your spoof page I remember that style of background with the repeating pictures. And I remember that some people really liked those pictures of the dancing hampsters...


There were also all those moving gif images...

AnimeSennin wrote:Were you a part of any webrings?

Gosh, I think my Linna page was a part of a BGC webring once upon a time. I really couldn't remember which one though. Eventually, I took it off my page because a lot of those pages would just disappear and such.

AnimeSennin wrote:I like your spoof page I remember that style of background with the repeating pictures. And I remember that some people really liked those pictures of the dancing hampsters...

I remember I had at least one person who thought that the page was legitimate. "I see you like Metallica a lot as well! We have some things in common, it seems."

Ah, I hated webrings. Even when they were in their heyday, it always seemed like a third of the sites on the ring were dead 404 pages... and even more might as well have been dead because their creator seemed to have slapped them together in a weekend and then moved on to other things.

Also, Geocities/Tripod/Angelfire-type sites back then hadn't refined their advertising methods yet, so you got some pretty atrocious layouts just inherent in the parent platform, what with the frames and popups they used.

I just put up a ton of DB moving gifs. Do you guys remember this stuff?

http://animepast.net/Museum/Old_Digital ... g_GIFs%29/

You mean the thousand of anime shrines that were so poorly designed you can barely read them? My favorites were the Evangelion shrines with dark blue text on black background.

Nah! Was into APAs at the time. Kept most of those though they are heavy tomes, some 2 or 3 inches thick. Fun stuff...