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That time I clicked a link on a 20 year old fansite and it actually worked
My buddy Marcus sent me a link to a Guild Wars fansite from 2005 that he swore was dead, and after laughing at the guestbook entries from 14 years ago I realized I had been wrong to assume every old site dies the second a forum goes quiet, so now I check the Wayback Machine before calling anything gone and I want to know what other people use to tell if a site is really abandoned or just quiet.
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umasullivan10d ago
Checked a dead guild forum last month and found the admin still pays the hosting bill out of pocket, so the site loads fine but nobody has posted since 2011. That got me wondering how you actually draw the line between a site that is truly gone and one that is just sitting there like an empty house. Do you go by the last post date, or do you poke around for signs of life like a working login page or a copyright year that got updated? Because a forum can look stone cold dead on the front page while the backend is still getting patched, and that feels like the real test to me. So when you check the Wayback Machine first, what exactly are you looking for in those snapshots that tells you the place is done for good?
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