nicole

You've just unlocked a memory I thought I had buried for good.

i think i would have been served better by this than all the text terminal time i got.

web pages and guis have always been 2nd or 3rd languages to me

I don't remember this, but I was deep in the IRC wormhole starting in like 1995, so I don't think this would have captivated me if I had found it.

I miss this shit. I understand why no one would risk running something like that these days; imagine someone installing a Bitcoin miner of the computers of an army of kids who don't know why their computer runs like absolute dogshit every time @MelonHusk logs in. But I miss it. I miss when posting "+++ATH0" in IRC still had a non-zero chance of making someone log off; roll the dice if you're on dialup, maybe you log off depending on how your PPP frames line up, maybe Grognard from Finland who comes in from a dialup shell account and doesn't even have the thin protection of PPP framing does instead. It was all in good fun.

I understand why we can't have nice things. But I miss it.

Damn, now I'm trying to remember whether I just barely missed this or whether I saw it but never explored it while I had the chance.

(Also definitely gonna imagine a "what have you done to me / I am a hideousness" from you every time I see you on a new website, thanks.)

This is an amazing write up. My own trajectory went from AOL chats to IRC pretty fast, but I think we can all relate to the sudden loss of community. No matter what chat you were apart of, it happened and it probably happened suddenly. Thank you for posting this.

I don't have anything as amazing as this story, but there was a time where I knew how to do the IRC handshake protocol by heart so that I could log into IRC through a bare telnet client. LAN shops were big at that time and they didn't always have an IRC client installed when my social circle was in IRC. It was a neat way to quickly check in with internet friends while I was playing CounterStrike with real life friends.

So, this made me think about something silly. These days you could totally write a (comparatively) simple HTML renderer in something that compiles to wasm. You could then plug a network connection into that html renderer to receive stuff, and probably the sending bit could just be handled by your normal web browser.

You'd lose out on a lot of the features of a normal web browser (I imagine there would be some way to get clicked links out of this wasm application, but I have no idea how) but like. You could simulate something like this.

Huh it seems like you could build this exact same thing again safely(?) by using <iframe sandbox>.

imagining a Silmarillion-esque cosmology wherein the Age of Gods, the Age of Legends, the Age of Heroes, and the present age were all just different levels of user privileges and sandboxing.

(disclaimer: i've never read homestuck and don't know anything about it, so if it already did this idea then i plead ignorance.)

I spent a lot of my time growing up online and until maybe 2008 on a small forum/communal weblog I will not name out of shame. It was not real time, but it also didn't do any HTML validation on comments - but it did hide downvoted comments by default. It turns out that, in this community, that was enough? A few times people did something devious, like post an img posting to a URL that would downvote someone else's comment, but even that got spotted and collectively downvoted into invisibility.

(I just realised it's a little broken that that isn't a POST only endpoint, but the whole backend was very jankily written, and spent long periods of time effectively abandoned by the owner/admin, so)

Anyway, I also miss people closing other people's tags for them.

this is amazing, thank you for writing this

I either forgot or never knew Geocities did this. For me, it was Xoom/Beseen webchat. I guess it was probably kind of like Geocities, because I remember instead of neighborhoods, it was planets. The chat I frequented the most was on Jupiter, I think. The Beseen chat was a normal webpage with a refresh command that would trigger every 5 seconds, and there was a button to manually refresh it in order to check for new chat messages. It WAS very proto-social-media, in retrospect.

I spent a ton of time on geocities chat as a young teen. Met a couple lifelong friends there, in fact.

They actually did try to sanitize the html a bit. If you inspected the source, you’d see every post start with </i></color></b> and so on. They also added an option to put an <hr> tag between posts so you could tell when someone was trying to impersonate someone else with <br>. You had to opt in to this, though.

I remember when the teardrop vulnerability came out, I would post an href to an image hosted on my Linux box. The Apache logs would show me the referrer url of everyone in the chat room, along with their ip. Then I could crash the computer of whichever chatters I didn’t like. They eventually put a stop to this by blocking hrefs to ip addresses.

There was another website that used the same software—it was called L’Hotel. They seemed to have slightly more sophisticated sanitization than geocities, thus it was a lot more boring.

I love how the "infinitely long http response" trick still works extremely well for sending real-time messages from server -> client (in the form of "long polling")
(except now you'll usually close and reopen the request after a message is recieved)

I would have loved this! The earliest chat room I remember was probably using javascript, since I don't remember it being an applet. For some reason I think this was on foxtrot.com (the website for the comic strip), but I could be misremembering. It was associated with the comic, anyway. There was no user authentication, so you could take any name not in use, but it was a faux pas to take someone else's username. When it grew large enough I could no longer reliably get my desired name, and it had mostly devolved to a never ending "a/s/l?" I left. I wasn't smart enough to figure out IRC by myself at the time.

Thank you for writing this. It's a wonderful look into a little bit of web history I never could have known. Thanks for keeping this bit of history alive.

A look back onto times wonderous and awesome. These early communities had a sort of purity in their chaos.

A publicly accessible space where people were able to truly test the limits of what they were capable of in the medium. Which is admittedly kind of terrifying in retrospect, but you certainly give the impression that the harm that could be caused WAS limited, relatively speaking, due to the tech of the time.

Well, until someone figured out how to break the whole thing wide open, I guess. But even then, I have to wonder if it was done with understanding of the gravity of the action.

thank you for sharing this. i never got to experience those days but i love learning about one

(though i did experience the joy of unsanitized html chats when my friend built a chatroom back in high school, and there really was something beautiful about it)

I was on the early Internet at way too young an age. My mom was in some of the very first Internet chat rooms, and I found them through her. They were the kind you manually had to refresh to get new messages from, though! But this sounds WAY more like the wild wild west the rest of the Internet was... absolutely fascinating! Thank you so much for sharing.

If anyone wants to replicate this, I have some good news.

If you don't know, matrix is an open source chat app that's very similar to discord in functionality, but it's federated like mastodon. So anyone can make a client, and implement it however they want, as long as they follow the standard. And anyone with a matrix account anywhere can log onto any matrix client.

A friend of mine made their own matrix client: https://horrible.site/matrix/login.html

Log into this, and you can chat with anyone on matrix. But it will insert all text directly into the page as html, allowing similar shenanigans to geocities chat. It's all sandboxed in an iframe, and JavaScript is off so it's complete safe.

This isn't exactly like geocities chat, but I hope it gives some people a similar feeling.

I have seen another chat that was technically similar - attached to furry pornographer Mama Bliss's website, of all things - but nobody there ever did anything with HTML. We were there to horn on one another, not to hack a website.

I didn't use this, but it is reminding me of when I was a kid and using AIM groups which let everyone customize their text (a feature that is basically nonexistent in any chat these days without a bunch of extra work - fair, I guess, to not torment people with vision problems who can't read your damn bright yellow font, but I feel like that's a self-correcting problem, since if the guy with the bright yellow font refuses to change it he's not staying in that group long these days) and learned basic HTML when designing my pet pages on Neopets, which was the first time I had access to something that I could modify all I wanted. That was fun and made me feel Cool and like I had Learned A Skill. It's kind of sad I never pursued coding.

I think I might remember this vaguely from a few geocities websites I encountered? I think I remember instead of just pressing enter, you had to actually click the submit button to submit. Either way, thanks for sharing. I was on geocities in that era, 1996 when I was 11, so this brought back lots of memories. My SimCity 2000 website URL had a city, village, street name, and street number in that order. I'm not sure if that came before or after in the timeline of geocities naming systems