Right now, I am digging the web for snippets of the past that I still remember. It looks as if my Google skills are slowly improving again, since I am starting to find stuff. And what I found is really amazing me. Someone did the work to preserve the old VRI guestbook (originally found at http://users.aol.com/LirielMc/private/vri.htm). Or at least parts of it.
http://members.fortunecity.com/thearchives/vri/vrimar.html
I have no idea who built this site. I will dare a guess and say Liriel placed it there as a last remainder of the page which was discontinued 2002 and taken offline 2005. The index page is not working anymore, also, the links within the document structure are dysfunctional, however, these pages still exist. For now, you can find them all by modifying the last thee letters before the .htm towards the remaining months names.This is, however, less than 20 percent of the original contents.
I have decided to save those pages offline for the moment and maybe convert them into .pdf for the sake of preserving them. Archive.org did it once again and preserved the old versions of the site until approximately March 2000. But it makes me wonder... So much material from the old times has simply vanished. I mean, what did we have back then? There was the Vampire White Pages. There was the VRI guestbook. There was an obscure little corner called the OOD. Shortly afterwards, HOM and the first growing sites and places. Those who made it saved the relevant files to a certain degree. But what about all my first emails, guestbook-discussions, the old-old VCMB stuff? I believe it is long gone. I cannot even find the first version of Sangis Bloody Minded board anymore on archive.org. The first preserved VCMB design is already a later version.
However, this example shows me that it is worth trying to find information long lost. I loved reading through all these old postings. Lolz we had... and a lot of rants and raves. And I was like... young... I better stop reading before I get all anachronistic and stuff...
