That old web ring site from 1999 I found still ticking at 543 members

I stumbled on a web ring for indie music bloggers that last added a new site in 2006... it says 543 total members on the homepage but that number hasn't budged in over a decade. I clicked through a few of the dead links and one actually still had a forum post from October 2004 where someone argued about mp3 bitrates. It kinda freaked me out that the counter is frozen but the page keeps running. Has anyone else found a milestone counter on an old site that just... stopped?

2 comments

2 Comments

eric_price8d ago

Oh dude, "refresh a few times to see if the counter actually updates" is the first thing I tried. I hit it like ten times just to be sure. The weird thing is, the page actually reloaded with a new timestamp at the bottom, but that member count stayed exactly at 543. So it's not cached or broken in the usual way, it's like the code just... stopped running after a certain point. I bet someone hardcoded that number as a milestone and never put in a real counting script, so it's just a permanent save point from whenever the last person actually joined. Reminds me of those old forum counters that would roll over backwards when they hit 9999 because the programmer forgot to account for more digits.

skyler_craig8d ago

You ever try hitting refresh a few times to see if the counter actually updates or if it's just a static number baked into the page? Might be cached or just broken code that never got fixed.