Wayback Wednesday: Webrings & Yahoo! GeoCities

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m reflecting on when webrings and Yahoo! GeoCities were major parts of the basketball gaming community.

Want to make me feel old? It’s getting much easier the closer that I edge to forty, but an effective method would be to ask “Andrew, what do you mean by webrings, or Yahoo! GeoCities?” Yes, it’s a sign that I’m getting older, and that I’ve been online for a long time, and how much the internet has changed, that there are people who will wonder what I’m talking about when I mention Yahoo! GeoCities and webrings! In an era where it’s all about algorithms and SEO, with a number of platforms for content creation and self-promotion, they’re antiquated concepts indeed.

Still, like many things from the early days of the basketball gaming community that don’t need to make a comeback, they’re nevertheless nostalgic for those of us who remember them. At the same time, I’m also grateful that better solutions have been developed, because it certainly was the Stone Age of the World Wide Web. So, what’s the deal with webrings and Yahoo! GeoCities? Let’s take a look back…way back…

We’ll begin with webrings (or web rings, as it was sometimes written). Webrings were a collection of websites, usually centred on a common theme, that all linked to each other in a “ring”. This took the form of a common navigation bar that appeared on all of the sites, which allowed visitors to proceed to the next site in the “ring”, eventually circling back to the first site they’d visited. It was a community initiative that many unofficial fansites took part in, as it was a means of supporting each other and sharing traffic. It’s also the reason that many sites had a “Links” page – as we did back in the day – but it was more effective in taking visitors on a journey through related fansites.

Webrings had to be maintained, and this task fell to someone in the community, most likely whoever was running the most prominent site in the ring. In the days of the NBA Live Webring, that was us; the NBA Live Series Center, as we were then called. I remember the pride I felt when my old site, the NBA Live Domain, was added to the webring. It certainly helped with traffic, and it really did make me feel “legit”; as legit as an unofficial fansite can be, of course. The now-defunct WebRing.com was used to manage rings around the web, for a variety of hobbies and interests. The service made it easy for anyone to manage a webring, and also to pass along that responsibility.

That’s something that happened when one of our founders, Tim, was scaling back his involvement with the NLSC. Tim asked if anyone in the community was interested in maintaining the NBA Live Webring in his stead, and I eagerly volunteered. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some ego involved, as taking over the webring made me feel important. However, I also believed in its usefulness, as it had definitely helped my site to gain visibility. There were a number of NBA Live fansites in the late 90s and early 2000s, and we mostly all got along; at least in those early days. As such, sharing traffic with each other was part of having a site in the NBA Live community.

Come the turn of the millennium, the online landscape was changing. Yahoo! had acquired WebRing.com, just as they had GeoCities. They made a few changes to the way that webrings were maintained that were generally unpopular, before more or less abandoning the service in 2001. There was an attempt to revive it as a premium service in 2006, but by then, it was already an outdated idea. Indeed, it was already falling out of vogue when Yahoo! first ended their support for it in 2001, since search engines – primarily Google – were far more effective in finding websites and bringing in traffic. Even before our revamp in 2002, the NBA Live Webring had been retired.

That brings us to Yahoo! GeoCities. It’s a name that will invoke plenty of nostalgia for internet users and content creators of a certain age, specifically anyone who was online in the mid to late 90s. GeoCities was a web hosting service that began life as Beverley Hills Internet, which ended up being used by countless people to create free websites or web pages (and yes, I maintain there’s a difference between those terms). When signing up to GeoCities, users selected a “neighbourhood” which corresponded to the theme of their site/page. When I created the NBA Live Domain, I picked the “Colosseum” neighbourhood, though it was strictly supposed to be for real sports.

Within our community, GeoCities was one of the most commonly-used services for NBA Live fansites, along with Angelfire and Tripod. The original “neighbourhood” approach did lead to some clunky URLs for our sites, but not long after Yahoo! acquired GeoCities – a move that yielded its fair share of controversy – we were able to choose vanity URLs, much like we can now do with a YouTube channel. For those of us who couldn’t afford a dot com, being located at geocities.com/wherever was the next best thing. Of course, the saying goes that you get what you pay for, and the free hosting of Yahoo! GeoCities definitely had some drawbacks for NBA Live modders.

Compared to commercial hosting solutions, Yahoo! GeoCities offered very limited storage space and bandwidth. Although these increased slightly over time to account for the growing popularity of the World Wide Web – and to compete with what other free hosts were offering – it became difficult to host your mods on a Yahoo! GeoCities site. This led to modders spreading their work out across a few different webhosts, or using other free file sharing services. It’s why so many great mods for classic NBA Live games have unfortunately disappeared over the years. When Yahoo! Geocities itself was closed down in 2009, even more mods were lost, seemingly forever.

With that being said, for all the limitations and lack of future-proofing that came with Yahoo! GeoCities, it was a vital solution in the early days of our community. Because many of us were quite young, and commercial hosting solutions weren’t as affordable as they are now, it was a way to establish a presence on the web. Just as anyone can now set up a Discord server, or a Facebook page and/or group, Yahoo! GeoCities not only provided free hosting, but also the tools to set up a page or multi-page website. I’m guessing that many of us who taught ourselves HTML and web design in the late 90s used Yahoo! GeoCities when we were taking our first steps into that online world.

Once again, both webrings and the neighbourhoods of Yahoo! GeoCities provided a method of promoting our websites. These days we have search engine optimisation and hashtags on social media platforms, but back then, web directories and word of mouth/promotion from an established site were essential to being discovered. Within our community, the NBA Live Webring was meant to achieve that. Also, since it utilised code generated by WebRing.com and the list of sites was maintained using that service, it was easy to remove URLs to avoid breaking the ring with defunct sites. Google rendered it unnecessary by 2001, but it had been a good solution in its day.

There were also community initiatives at Yahoo! GeoCities intended to help with promotion. I recall submitting the NBA Live Domain to a council that oversaw all the “Colosseum” hosted sites to be reviewed, hoping for some useful feedback and even the chance of being promoted as a featured site. They ended up giving the NBA Live Domain a B grade, generally praising its layout and content, but deducting marks for a lack of focus, citing the “rarely-used subtopic of NBA Live”. Keep in mind that it was clearly an NBA Live fansite, completely dedicated to that topic! They sent along an image so that I could promote my B grade from the council. I didn’t display it.

Time marches on and brings better solutions. These days, it’s cheap and easy to create your own site with your own domain name. Many content creators don’t bother with a website, with their handle on social media platforms being all they need to share and promote their work. Promoting another creator involves re-Tweets, direct links to their content, and collaborations on videos. Not only are WebRing.com and Yahoo! GeoCities both defunct, but the services they provided are outmoded and gave way to superior solutions. There’s no shame in that, of course. It’d be most unfortunate if we hadn’t devised better ways of producing and sharing content since the early 2000s!

At the same time, there’s something special and nostalgic about them. Webrings in particular represented a time when content creation was more cooperative than competitive. That’s not to say that there’s no cooperation now or that there was no competitiveness back then, but there was the goodwill of creating a community and a network of fansites. There was also novelty in creating your own site. Before social media, it was a means of having your own platform, and cultivating an audience. As someone who’s still creating in the community over twenty years later, those days represent a time when it was a fresh and exciting new venture that I was diving into.

Still, some things are best left in the past. I don’t miss only having 15 MB – yes, that’s megabytes – of storage space to work with. I don’t miss having a host that disables my site until midnight because it was a busy day, and all of the allotted bandwidth has been used. I’m glad that we show up on Google, and that I can promote our content on social media. It’s nice not to be at the mercy of what a company is willing to provide as part of their free services, or indeed, if they’ll continue providing them as long as I need them. Nevertheless, along with other free hosting services, they were vital in building and sustaining our community until better and affordable solutions arrived.