Old forum mods kept telling me my dead fansite was junk, but a librarian in Ohio proved them wrong
Back in 2009 I ran a little fansite for a local band from Akron, maybe 40 visitors a month, and the mods on a webmaster board told me to just delete it since dead sites are clutter. I almost did, but a librarian in Columbus emailed me saying she used my old tour date list to help a student with a history project. Now I leave every dead page up exactly as it was, broken guestbook and all. Turns out an abandoned site is still a record of something, even if nobody signs the guestbook anymore. How many of you keep old sites up just for that one stranger who still needs them?
That librarian in Columbus basically did what archivists do with paper records. A band's whole history can live on a GeoCities page with a hit counter stuck at 1,847 and a guestbook last signed in 2011. I dug up a defunct message board for a Toledo venue a while back, and someone had posted the full setlist from a 2006 show that never made it to any database. That one post was worth more than the ten active forums I checked first. Dead pages are like attic boxes. You don't toss them just because nobody's opened them lately.