Guestbooks run with CGL/Perl. Nice messages and no spam 😀

The lack of flash use.

I sure as heck don't miss frames. Frames can burn in hell. Also, redundant splash/intro pages.

I really miss "mailbags". Remember those? Someone in a position of authority putting out a curated selection of comments accompanied with informed responses? What it lacked in interactivity it more than made up for in sheer quality.

The 90s were exciting. Went from BBS to Prodigy/AOL/etc to WWW in only a few years. It seemed smaller and more personal than now too.

But really things are the same in a lot of ways. Just more refined and with a massively larger audience. Oh and the web browser doesn't crash the whole OS hourly anymore 🤣

I miss the old websites and their information that was lost when places like Geocities shut down.

Unknown_K wrote:

I miss the old websites and their information that was lost when places like Geocities shut down.

There are numerous backups of Geocities out there, and there's Archive.org for most other things. And even then whatever tiny percentage of that vast quantity of data is still particularly useful is probably duplicated somewhere else.

I also miss Geocities and Aol Home for its having free website for you to have. There were a lot of anime sites and crazy personal web pages.

catchaserguns wrote:

There were a lot of anime sites and crazy personal web pages.

THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION
HENTAI-FREE SITE

PART OF THE ANIME MANGA WEBRING

Speaking of webrings, I'm having trouble backtracking old webrings for old sites, since the webring domains are all robots'd against archive.org 😒

I miss the lack of spam in my eMail box. :/

The internet was a nicer place to be before the advent of social media.

The only thing I don't miss was Dialup connection speeds.

Forevermore wrote:

The only thing I don't miss was Dialup connection speeds.

or the times when you discovered you had forgot to disconnect and the phone line had been busy overnight or the whole day. In Europe we never had flatrate dialup internet untill very recently so the cost from making a mistake like that was also quite high!

(Deleted - with prejudice! 😜 )

It's easy to shake your cane and whinge about kids on your lawn and the fancy-shmancy social media features you don't like, but let's be honest, the web used to be crap.

In the bad old days of "web directories" and crude search engines like AltaVista and Webcrawler, it was tough to find quality information. It wasn't always that the information wasn't out there, it was just because it either hadn't been manually submitted to the indexers, or because their result ranking was based on worthless but easy-to-implement criteria, like the number of times your words appear on a page.

Then there were frames, <MARQUEE>, <BLINK>, splash/landing pages, radically differing browser-specific HTML quirks, background auto-start MIDIs, animated GIF overload, and so on. I remember the past fondly, but to say I miss it would be plain wrong. The web is so much nicer to use now.

The main thing that I regret is the decline of various forums with the advent of the social media sites. It is one thing if all you want to do is prattle on about nothing and meaningless small talk, but they are worthless for any kind of real discussion. Social media is all too often little more than idiotic drive-by quips.

There are several good points made in this thread already.

Direct links to media files as opposed to streaming services. I still remember downloading gaming videos and watching them in a media player instead of going to that place. Sure file hosting capabilities weren't high, and we sometimes had to deal with split archives that weren't directly playable, but the situation would have improved by itself over time. Today all these videos are transcoded. I recalled seeing the "Developers Developers" performance by Steve Ballmer, but had trouble finding a good copy of it, as everyone just links there.

Forums haven't disappeared yet, but they sure seem to be in the process of. As a matter of fact I was really upset about it a minute ago. All the alternatives like blogging comments, are either incredibly slow or have so radically different layout that I risk being equally off-topic trying to figure out how to post there. All the differences between IPB, vB or phpBB, punBB et al, were negligible compared to those.

Animated page elements haven't exactly gone away. I'm quite anoyed by the design elements that scroll sideways forever between 4-6 pages, and may have these little lights that indicate which page is currently shown. There is no universally obvious way to stop the scrolling if I'm not interestested in the content. They are as distracting as advertisements, which they are not. And worse than Marquee or GIFs, these use much more CPU time.

No flat rate dial-up here either. I remember when going online, I always felt under time pressure. Don't miss that, but that's off-topic.

I miss when Google was just a search engine and wasn't planning world domination.

I wanted to buy a trampoline for my kids the other day, a quick google found me some impartial, location specific advice and reviews, one of which included a link to a local distributor. The local distributor's site was fantastic, and within a few seconds of landing on it a "chat" dialog popped up in the bottom right and I was able to ask a question of the sales person on the other end, all real-time. I ordered, payed, and it showed up two days later at my house. That all took ~15 mins.

I f*@king love the modern internet.

I miss those days when spambots would come up with bizarre dadaist poetry in an attempt to evade heuristic algorithms. These days when they try at all, the results are just plain forgettable most of the time.

j7n wrote:

Direct links to media files as opposed to streaming services. I still remember downloading gaming videos and watching them in a media player instead of going to that place. Sure file hosting capabilities weren't high, and we sometimes had to deal with split archives that weren't directly playable, but the situation would have improved by itself over time. Today all these videos are transcoded. I recalled seeing the "Developers Developers" performance by Steve Ballmer, but had trouble finding a good copy of it, as everyone just links there.

I vastly prefer being able to click a button to watch a video rather than having to wait for it to download completely and then wrestling with whatever wacky, randomly-chosen codecs someone decided to use that day to encode it. Of course, codecs are a lot more standardized in general these days and download speeds are so fast that it's not a problem to pause a video and wait for it to buffer most of the time. I sure as heck don't miss being beholden to Quicktime or RealPlayer, that's for sure.

SKARDAVNELNATE wrote:

I miss when Google was just a search engine and wasn't planning world domination.

I for one welcome our Google overlords. I cant wait for their cheap gigabit fiber project to come to Denver. $70 for unlimited 1g/1g internet? The fact its so aggressively priced is making all the other providers shake in their boots. I currently have Comcast and I'm paying $225 a month for tv & 60/10 internet. Granted their service has been flawless for years, words can't describe how fast i'd kick them to the curb when gig fiber comes to town.

As for dialup... I remember using those free aol disks. LOTS of them. I made so many fake accounts, i don't think i paid for internet access for years. I remember using this bad boy in my free geocities webpage:

As for ads, I block most at my router. its one of the perks of using an old p3 xeon rig as a router. the ones that do get by are caught by adblock. youtube was lousy with crappy ads for a while until i installed magic actions for youtube. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mag … ecdgepllmpfceif It makes a WORLD of difference.