PSA: That one Geocities fan site archive I found had most of its pages already dead

I spent like 3 hours last night trying to pull up this old fan site for a canceled TV show from 2001. The link was on a forum post from 2010 and I was really excited because someone said it had rare production sketches. Well I clicked it and got a 404. No big deal I thought, I'll check the Wayback Machine. Problem was the page only got saved 4 times between 2002 and 2004 and three of those archives were just blank frames. The fourth one had some text but all the images were hosted on Angelfire which is long gone. I ended up finding a cached version through an old Google result from 2005 but even that was missing half the content. Took me about 2 hours total to get maybe 3 blurry thumbnails out of it. Has anyone else had luck finding older Geocities mirrors that actually kept the image hosting working?

2 comments

2 Comments

brian_murray16d ago

Oh yeah I once found a Star Wars fan site that only loaded if you visited it between 2am and 4am Pacific time for some reason.

wyattbennett17d ago

Wait you actually found a cached Google result from 2005 that still worked? I thought those were all gone by now.