Weirdest site you found on the internet - Bonus points if still online.

[Rekkington]

I was looking at the Heaven's Gate site. If you go to the bottom of the page and highlight the footer text below the address all the way to the bottom of the page, there is this crazy ramble text that is set to color="#000000". (making it not display)


It looks like they used this text to set search engine keywords, but it's still looks crazy.

This is most likely an early SEO technique, which would have worked back in the day. This would be like loading your header metatags with dozens or hundreds of keywords you think would let people find your site because that would be a way to trick early search engines and webcrawlers. It's not meant to be read by people and all of the keyphrases appear to be thematically related, and I think the repetition part is relevant to the ranking as well.

 

[Volthoom]

Anonib.com was a forerunner of 8chan, except of just creating a singular board, you would create your own "chan" that could have multiple boards under it. The reason I bring it up because I saw something on their I have never, and I mean never seen before or after. It looks liked this "chan" was about cumshots, so I went in expecting regular facials and the like.

The first board was debicated to guys doing cum tributes of children. They were regular, non-pornographic family photos of children that these guys would cum on, take a picture of, and post. The second board was photos of baby dolls covered in cum. Guys were cumming on babydolls and posting pics, giving them the "hot glue" treatment.

That is the weirdest thing I've ever seen, because I have not seen either of those ever since.

In the same vein, there is a whole wiki debicated to "boy lovers" that sometimes comes up google searches if you are looking into pedo crimes and conspiracies.

That's just nasty. I mean seriously what the fuck!

 

[Don Yagon]

Does anyone remember DoxDog? You'd enter usernames into it and it would scour the web & spit out all relevant dox in a neatly formatted list.

Very nifty, but long gone.

Quite late, but after reading that I remembered Snoop, a command-line utility for searching users on a plethora of sites by nickname, supporting >1500 sites in total (although many of those are Russian/ex-USSR forums). It itself is a fork of Sherlock, which supports less sites (about ~300), but seems to be better maintained, with actual commit descriptions instead of "upd" and such.

 

[Furret]

Brucebase. Not as weird as some of the other stuff in this thread, but I think it's worth mentioning. An unbelievably massive collection of information about Bruce Springsteen, including all the information they can find about every concert he's ever performed. According to the front page, they have over 13000 pages of information about this one dude. I don't know how anyone has this kinda time, but I can't help but be a little impressed by the dedication.

 

[A Logging Company]

Brucebase. Not as weird as some of the other stuff in this thread, but I think it's worth mentioning. An unbelievably massive collection of information about Bruce Springsteen, including all the information they can find about every concert he's ever performed. According to the front page, they have over 13000 pages of information about this one dude. I don't know how anyone has this kinda time, but I can't help but be a little impressed by the dedication.

Wait until you run into The Beatles fanbase.

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

http://arngren.net/

I don't even know where to begin...

 

[The Empirical Bogey]

http://arngren.net/

I don't even know where to begin...

Looks like Amazon put together by a tard.

 

[Furret]

Looks like Amazon put together by a tard.

I seriously can't even tell what the people behind this website are trying to do. Are they trying to sell me shit? What is the purpose of this website?

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

What is the purpose of this website?

I've been trying to answer this question for the last 3 years, so feel free to join.

 

[The Empirical Bogey]

I'm trying to answer this question for the last 3 years, so feel free to join.

I like how clicking the language option takes you to a listing for a handheld translator.

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

I like how clicking the language option takes you to a listing for a handheld translator.

I know, right? Pretty clever

 

[The Empirical Bogey]

I seriously can't even tell what the people behind this website are trying to do. Are they trying to sell me shit? What is the purpose of this website?

I did some digging regarding autistic Norwegian Amazon. It's the website of an Oslo-based hobby shop run by a geeky guy known as Frithjof Arngern.

He's into flying cars (why his company's name is "Arngern Sky Commuter"):

https://6xqyz75t6vy6y2ikw4ua65a2pu-adwhj77lcyoafdy-www-arngren-net.translate.goog/moller.html

And also wants to make a movie:

https://6xqyz75t6vy6y2ikw4ua65a2pu-adwhj77lcyoafdy-www-arngren-net.translate.goog/film

Hope this answers your questions @The Crawling Chaos

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

http://arngren.net/

I don't even know where to begin...

It's also advertising that they have 23 stores.

I've been to the one in Oslo and it's not a store, it's a pickup place so you order through their horrible website. The location of the store is fantastic.

"Do you see the red shipping containers? No, then you're at the wrong harbor. Unless they've shipped those, they were red earlier."

It was close to a good RC circuit, close in the sense that you were going down that road way anyway and you won't fucking walk to that store so you're driving.

I broke a lot of expensive shit there because I had no idea what I was doing other than living my childhood dream of having an RC car that didn't run on batteries. Good times.

 

[JershyPwease]

http://www.corkscrew-balloon.com/home.html

I was looking through the sources for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutaneous_horn, and came across;

"Madame Dimanche, called Widow Sunday, a French woman living in Paris in the early 19th century, grew a 24.9 cm (9.8") horn from her forehead in six years from the age of 76 before it was successfully removed by French surgeon Br. Joseph Souberbeille (1754–1846). A wax model of her head is on display at the Mütter Museum, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, US.[10]" .

So naturally I wanted to have a look at the wax model. Source linked me to above listed site. It's pretty weird, I think the guy who made it was some sort of sex tourist to Thailand who found a wife and settled down.

Half of the site doesn't load in for me until I wait ~45 seconds. It was updated from ~1998 - 2016.

One particularly bad section is

http://www.corkscrew-balloon.com/02/03/1bkk/14a.html

 

[mr.moon1488]

http://arngren.net/

I don't even know where to begin...

If there were more train-related things, I would think that that's a shopping site for Norwegian autists.

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

God bless the power of autism...

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

I did some digging regarding autistic Norwegian Amazon. It's the website of an Oslo-based hobby shop run by a geeky guy known as Frithjof Arngern.

He's into flying cars (why his company's name is "Arngern Sky Commuter"):

https://6xqyz75t6vy6y2ikw4ua65a2pu-adwhj77lcyoafdy-www-arngren-net.translate.goog/moller.html

And also wants to make a movie:

https://6xqyz75t6vy6y2ikw4ua65a2pu-adwhj77lcyoafdy-www-arngren-net.translate.goog/film

Hope this answers your questions @The Crawling Chaos

It's also advertising that they have 23 stores.

I've been to the one in Oslo and it's not a store, it's a pickup place so you order through their horrible website. The location of the store is fantastic.

"Do you see the red shipping containers? No, then you're at the wrong harbor. Unless they've shipped those, they were red earlier."

It was close to a good RC circuit, close in the sense that you were going down that road way anyway and you won't fucking walk to that store so you're driving.

I broke a lot of expensive shit there because I had no idea what I was doing other than living my childhood dream of having an RC car that didn't run on batteries. Good times.

It answers some questions, and thank you for digging into it, but the question that bothers me the most is why?!

The first snapshot of this website goes back to 2003.

Now I understand that back then, web design wasn't that good, actually it was shit (no ux, ui consistency was all over the place, flash was considered hot stuff etc.), and you have to work with what you got, but fast forward to present day and nothing changed. Nothing! No improvements, no updates on the layout, absolutely 0 effort. I don't get it, it's not like building a website like this is hard in 2021.

I just can't empathize with someone who would put a customer through this gauntlet of pain.

 

[Furret]

It answers some questions, and thank you for digging into it, but the question that bothers me the most is why?!

The first snapshot of this website goes back to 2003.

Now I understand that back then, web design wasn't that good, actually it was shit (no ux, ui consistency was all over the place, flash was considered hot stuff etc.), and you have to work with what you got, but fast forward to present day and nothing changed. Nothing! No improvements, no updates on the layout, absolutely 0 effort. I don't get it, it's not like building a website like this is hard in 2021.

I just can't empathize with someone who would put a customer through this gauntlet of pain.

Implying that this was serviceable for 2003 is an insult to 2003 websites. I couldn't navigate this shit to save my life. At least other ancient websites are usable.

 

[AmpleApricots]

It answers some questions, and thank you for digging into it, but the question that bothers me the most is why?!

The first snapshot of this website goes back to 2003.

Now I understand that back then, web design wasn't that good, actually it was shit (no ux, ui consistency was all over the place, flash was considered hot stuff etc.), and you have to work with what you got, but fast forward to present day and nothing changed. Nothing! No improvements, no updates on the layout, absolutely 0 effort. I don't get it, it's not like building a website like this is hard in 2021.

I just can't empathize with someone who would put a customer through this gauntlet of pain.

Young whippersnapper, the answer to that riddle is easy - It's emulating earlier physical media like a lot of computer UI designs did and still do. Lots of warehouse ordering deals that weren't as fancy as some catalogs with nicer illustrations (and paper) would put out paper catalogs with razor-thin paper pages (think phone book if you remember even that) where every item you could order/buy was stuffed as a low-res picture next to each other up front, usually with the price and maybe an article number (for mail or phone order) imposed on it, just like on that website. Then for some if not most articles there would also be a page number in the picture you could turn to to see the article in question in more detail as a bigger picture with a short text description or a list of important specs. Since this is the information age, the website in question doesn't use page numbers but hyperlinks for clicking. Doesn't make much sense in 2021 but is not completely random or without logic behind it either. My guess why it's still that way is inertia and old people in management of that company for whom 1991 feels five years away.

 

[The Crawling Chaos]

Implying that this was serviceable for 2003 is an insult to 2003 websites. I couldn't navigate this shit to save my life. At least other ancient websites are usable.

All I'm saying is that back in 2003 there was an excuse.