One of my passions is finding old websites with linkware websets but it’s hard when I can only find the site on the Wayback Machine because sometimes it’s practically a complete snapshot and sometimes it’s a background with a lot of broken graphic icons. I could always count on Lycos/Angelfire/Tripod sites, though! They had staying power and I thought they would be around forever.
Ha! said the universe. While those sites have had moments of instability, it has gotten really bad lately. It looks like Lycos has been dealing with a “server outage” since the beginning of the year.
The company that bought Lycos in 2018 is now having serious issues with financial hardships, lying to the Indian government about stock value and they just had a leadership change in mid-February. I can’t imagine getting 30 year old legacy website services back up and running is a high priority although there is a notice on the Lycos main page stating they are working on it.
So, my purpose in posting all this is to say that if you counted on any sites in those domains for anything - graphics, fan site stuff, whatever - you might want to check them! If they are down, keep checking because sites in each of the domains have been up intermittently. And, if you get lucky and are able to access the site, save it yourself or get a snapshot for the Wayback Machine!
Most of the sites that I have listed in my Linkware Websets I’ve copied with HTTrack but I’m sad about losing the sites I wasn’t able to capture.
That is pretty much the general reaction of people - that’s still around?? What’s really wild is there are people out there who are still using Lycos for their email!
When I was younger, I thought the way Angelfire would compartmentalize the sites into “neighborhoods” was clever: they’d only let in so many sites until one got full, and it seemed like it was more for keeping the backend organized. Knowing more about how those systems work, now it totally seems like it was just a confusing discoverability gimmick.
Also really glad Ted’s Caving Page got saved. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time.
I can strongly recommend the Wayback Machine extension, which has a option to automatically save pages that you visit. I’ve set it to save pages that haven’t been archived in a year.
When I first made this thread, Lycos had a message on their home page stating they were working on recovering from a server outage. Apparently on March 6 they posted a notice that Angelfire and Tripod would be closing down in 30 days and they encouraged people to move their hosting elsewhere. They then removed that message but, if you view page source, it’s still there:
I went to Wikipedia’s Angelfire entry today and noticed that in the info box it states Dissolved 2026. I can’t find information anywhere else on the web stating this. As of today, most of the time the Angelfire homepage will come up but no individual Angelfire sites.
In 2019 Internet Archive’s Archive Team archived Angelfire sites but those files are locked. The Archive Team has not archived Tripod at all. There are sites from those domains on the Wayback Machine but, at least with the Angelfire sites, a lot of those are very incomplete saves.
So it looks like Angelfire is gone gone. Tripod has been up and down. If there’s an old site that you might want, I would try getting to it before Tripod, too, is gone gone. I keep hoping that something magical will happen and the sites will pop back up but I think even my powers of self-delusion are getting taxed. This erasure of Internet history is so, so sad!
Tripod is officially dead. Lycos had put up a notice on their site in early March stating Tripod and Angelfire would be shutting down within 30 days, then removed that notice, then put it back up in early April. That was the only communication Lycos was giving anyone, even people who still received their e-mail or had active websites through them.
Angelfire had stopped working for a while but I was still able to access Tripod intermittently. The plug was pulled on Friday April 24 (while I was in the middle of trying to save a graphics site, the unprintable words).
I am happy I managed to save a few sites but so bummed for everything that was lost! Like I said, people were still using the service and maintaining websites. How many other legacy web space providers are there? 50megs.com is still around and so is freeservers.com. For now. I guess just let this be a lesson that nothing is forever and if there is a site you like (or even your own site!) make sure it’s backed up somewhere. I wish Lycos had thought to transfer the site information to Internet Archive somehow, but it seems the company was too busy doing shifty things to worry about it.
Did no-one manage to archive it in the way that was done with Geocities? I ask this as a fairly uninformed person, and realise that I may well be comparing apples with oranges
Internet Archive made a concerted effort to archive Angelfire sites back in 2019. There was no concerted effort to archive Tripod sites. I have no idea what goes into the decisions of what to save although I’m guessing funds and staffing might have something to do with it.
I did see in the last month or so more archiveteam saves. However, the service was so degraded by then that a lot of what got saved were error pages.
At least the Sims CC sites I know have been archived in some way, but still.
