- Registrado
- 27 de Sep, 2018
Not sure if this is the right place for this thread, so I apologize in advance if it needs to be moved or merged. This is for discussing and archiving content from defunct sites and forums. Given that dead sites by their nature cannot produce additional content, I felt it was appropriate to create a single thread to cover the topic in general. This can also apply to websites that are still running, but whose activity has slowed to such a degree that it's effectively dead.
YA homepage (archived)
The site that inspired me to make this thread is yoshiart.com (archive) and its forums yoshiartforums.com (formerly forums.2yr.net). True to its name, it was a site that primarily hosted art and media about the Nintendo character Yoshi. I believe it dated back to about 2001 judging from the copyright date from this video here (please don't ask my why this retard was recording himself accessing the site through the Wii's build-in web browser) and various other archives. I don't know exactly what kind of numbers it pulled, but according to this archive from 2005 there were 150 registered members on the forum. By 2008 it had just over 1000 according to this, so it must have seen some level of growth over its lifespan. The site stopped receiving updates around 2010 and the last update from the site admin Soul in 2014.
The YoshiArt website proper hosted all sorts of media (although all of it was related to Yoshi in some way), from game MIDIs/MP3s to speedruns to fan art. Notably, it was one of the only sites to host entire episodes of the Super Mario World cartoon that aired in the 90s, presumably because it featured the green dinosaur. Why is this relevant? Well, this was during the era of YouTube where there was a length limit on uploaded videos, so this was likely one of the only sites where you could easily download them in their full length (albeit at a fairly low quality). If you watched YouTube Poops or Mama Luigi memes around that time, you should remember the YoshiArt watermark on most (if not all) of the SMW videos. This was the site where people downloaded them. An archive of these uploads exists here.
The amount and overall quality of media on the actual website was - particularly for the time - fairly impressive. The same cannot be said about most of the fan art.
The real content, however, came from the forums. Imagine a forum full of autistic, mid-2000's furries, except they use Yoshis as their fursonas and were every bit as insufferable. It was infamous enough that it received its own ED page (archive) and a mention on SomethingAwful's Weekend Web series (archive). Ironically, these are the best sources we still have on what went on there, because any trace of the forums has seemingly been nuked from orbit beyond a handful of screenshots in the two links above and sporadic Wayback Machine snapshots. Regrettably, the forums themselves appear to be lost to time.
The forumgoers were exceptionally whiny and drama was frequent, unsurprisingly. As a result, they suffered from spammers shitting up their boards and had a big scary warning at the very top printing your IP and DNS addresses as a (likely ineffective) threat:
There was also a "hidden" subforum called "Journal" or something that was only available to users with a certain rank (rank was based on number of total posts). That was where the best content was, since it effectively served as a space for its hormonal adolescent userbase to complain about IRL problems. None of that was obtained with the Wayback Machine (obviously).
In particular, there was a former user named Strat who for one reason or another had a bone to pick with the site and frequently created alts to spam. I distinctly remember this guy coming through multiple times a month creating accounts, making a handful of "real" posts, then promptly dumping shit everywhere until he was inevitably banned. He also posted these bizarre YouTube videos where he'd take screenshots of various posts in the forum and make fun of the users. Those videos have also likely been lost, but it appears that he made an appearance in this (also fucking strange and unintentionally hilarious) video.
tl;dw: A collection of heavily-compressed stock Yoshi art with a heavily-compressed "Proud to be an American" playing in the background
He seems to be on the other end of an argument where his posts aren't appearing, which leads me to believe his account was banned at some point or deleted (or something, I don't really know how YouTube handles that).
It's a shame that all his stuff appears to be scrubbed, because (from what I can recall and judging from the ED page) he might have been a proper cow all on his own.
There was also a writing subforum which hosted absolutely abysmal fanfiction. This random, stubby YouChew article about the site seems to corroborate that (archive).
There is a snapshot of the board that could clue you into the caliber of penmanship we're dealing with here, but I don't know if any of the threads themselves were archived (here).
A WARC archive of the YoshiArt.com site proper exists here. Big ups to whatever guy was compelled to perform such a thankless task. I have yet to comb through it in its entirety, but there's a sizeable collection ofsteaming shit fan art in it. The forums themselves, unfortunately, don't seem to be present as the archive was taken in 2015, and from what I gather the forums died around 2012. According to one of the archive descriptions, the YoshiArt.com site itself was shuttered during Fall 2017.
Slight PL but this was one of the first forums I ever frequented (to my chagrin). I'm also somewhat disappointed they've been dead for over 10 years, because I'm convinced there was some gold to be found there as far as cringey 2000s forums go.
Random assortment of links referencing YA/F:
There's a handful of other sites I'd like to investigate and maybe do writeups on, maybe another day.
Yoshi Art/Yoshi Art Forums
YA homepage (archived)
The Main Site
The YoshiArt website proper hosted all sorts of media (although all of it was related to Yoshi in some way), from game MIDIs/MP3s to speedruns to fan art. Notably, it was one of the only sites to host entire episodes of the Super Mario World cartoon that aired in the 90s, presumably because it featured the green dinosaur. Why is this relevant? Well, this was during the era of YouTube where there was a length limit on uploaded videos, so this was likely one of the only sites where you could easily download them in their full length (albeit at a fairly low quality). If you watched YouTube Poops or Mama Luigi memes around that time, you should remember the YoshiArt watermark on most (if not all) of the SMW videos. This was the site where people downloaded them. An archive of these uploads exists here.
The amount and overall quality of media on the actual website was - particularly for the time - fairly impressive. The same cannot be said about most of the fan art.
The Forums
The real content, however, came from the forums. Imagine a forum full of autistic, mid-2000's furries, except they use Yoshis as their fursonas and were every bit as insufferable. It was infamous enough that it received its own ED page (archive) and a mention on SomethingAwful's Weekend Web series (archive). Ironically, these are the best sources we still have on what went on there, because any trace of the forums has seemingly been nuked from orbit beyond a handful of screenshots in the two links above and sporadic Wayback Machine snapshots. Regrettably, the forums themselves appear to be lost to time.
The forumgoers were exceptionally whiny and drama was frequent, unsurprisingly. As a result, they suffered from spammers shitting up their boards and had a big scary warning at the very top printing your IP and DNS addresses as a (likely ineffective) threat:
There was also a "hidden" subforum called "Journal" or something that was only available to users with a certain rank (rank was based on number of total posts). That was where the best content was, since it effectively served as a space for its hormonal adolescent userbase to complain about IRL problems. None of that was obtained with the Wayback Machine (obviously).
In particular, there was a former user named Strat who for one reason or another had a bone to pick with the site and frequently created alts to spam. I distinctly remember this guy coming through multiple times a month creating accounts, making a handful of "real" posts, then promptly dumping shit everywhere until he was inevitably banned. He also posted these bizarre YouTube videos where he'd take screenshots of various posts in the forum and make fun of the users. Those videos have also likely been lost, but it appears that he made an appearance in this (also fucking strange and unintentionally hilarious) video.
He seems to be on the other end of an argument where his posts aren't appearing, which leads me to believe his account was banned at some point or deleted (or something, I don't really know how YouTube handles that).
It's a shame that all his stuff appears to be scrubbed, because (from what I can recall and judging from the ED page) he might have been a proper cow all on his own.
There was also a writing subforum which hosted absolutely abysmal fanfiction. This random, stubby YouChew article about the site seems to corroborate that (archive).
There is a snapshot of the board that could clue you into the caliber of penmanship we're dealing with here, but I don't know if any of the threads themselves were archived (here).
A WARC archive of the YoshiArt.com site proper exists here. Big ups to whatever guy was compelled to perform such a thankless task. I have yet to comb through it in its entirety, but there's a sizeable collection of
Slight PL but this was one of the first forums I ever frequented (to my chagrin). I'm also somewhat disappointed they've been dead for over 10 years, because I'm convinced there was some gold to be found there as far as cringey 2000s forums go.
Random assortment of links referencing YA/F:
- A Newgrounds post from 2021 (!!!) basically asking the same question I am here (archive)
- A YA Steam group founded in 2008
- There's a handful of threads archived by the Wayback Machine, but I haven't gone through them all yet. Likely to be some funny stuff (here)
- See also: yoshiscorner.com, a sister site that was - at one time - closely affiliated with YA and founded roughly around the same time. It still "survives" today (as in, the site is still functional. No one seems to post there anymore.)
There's a handful of other sites I'd like to investigate and maybe do writeups on, maybe another day.
Última edición por un moderador:
