Topsites... where did they go?

[ValyceNegative]

I frequently used topsites while exploring the web in my pre-social years, especially when looking for interesting fansites regarding games and anime. As a mere surfer, I liked the assurance that the sites on top of the list would be pleasing to the eye and full of quality content, though you could find some underappreciated gems in the rough if you dared to click among the middle ranks.

When I opened VN (my site) I wanted to try many of the staples of personal websites: affiliating, listing, webringing, awards, adoption graphics and... topsites! But the last ones were nowhere to be seen. The only one I found was PPN Top 50 ( https://www.ppntop50.com/ ) that hosts pages that are interestingly still alive however the topsite itself seems to be dead and site registration simply glitches out. I knew many other rankings, but they are all gone as far as I can see.

I'm surprised no one of the web revival/Neocities/Nekoweb communities has tried building a topsite and I don't see them mentioned anywhere. So it made me think... what happened? Is it a community effort to forget about them?

The only reason I could maybe imagine that could justify this is that topsites, probably, might encourage competition and rivarly among webmasters who'd want to climb on the ranking and would not be willing to share the podium with others. But I'm not sure if topsites during their heyday would actually create such a atmosphere; as an outsider, I liked to vote on the pages that most impressed me for their content and I imagined most of the satisfaction for webmasters would come from the same reason: knowing they were doing a good job based on collective feedback stored on a site. (Plus, they'd get another cool 88x31 graphics to display).

I'd love to hear about your opinions and experiences! <3

[prismaticpink]

Well, I cannot speak for everyone, but there are a lot of cool site trends/features we had that were simply forgotten, we just need to dig up our memories and the web archive to restore them lol. I just recently "unlocked" a memory of "site buildings" where likeminded people would get together (and Teeny Towers is a remake of those pages).

Your post now is an example of that. I did not remember anything about topsites before you mentioned them, but now I do. I wasn't an avid user of them, though.

I think topsites are a good idea. They serve a purpose, just like webrings and weblistings. It's always nice to have new ways of discovering websites, especially now that the mainstream web is constantly making effort to ban those who won't play the SEO Google game. Of course, there's always a downside to that, some people can take it too seriously, but that wouldn't be the first nor the last time the web revival community has seen some drama.

[ValyceNegative]

Aw, how cute! I had never come across those kind of cliques before but they totally remind me of either the Voyeur screensaver from the After Dark collection or that Simcity-like game where you manage a skyscraper (I'm pretty sure LGR reviewed it at some point, though since I'm a klutz I can't remember its title and "sims like game with apartment block" written on Goggle leads to nothing relevant) so I can definitely see the nostalgic values. Plus, like the Webgardens, projects like these help visualize sites as a collective of people mingling together rather than islands far from one another.

Hm, by your logic, I'd say the only solution to bring topsites back is to start making one of my own, hoping the idea will spread once again. Hmm, ponder ponder... 

[Slix]

I was on like, 5 Topsites back in the early 2010s! I really liked looking through the sites that were on there and finding new areas of the web to explore. I think there's room for this in the web today still. Categories helped keep things organized, and some type of ranking kept things fun and exciting for different sites to try to get more views.

Honestly, coding up one of these wouldn't be too hard I think. You'd have to put in spam prevention and some mechanic to keep things "fair" so one site can't jump up in a day to the top, or something like that though, for sure.

@ValyceNegative Shoutout for the After Dark reference! 

[prismaticpink]

Hm, by your logic, I'd say the only solution to bring topsites back is to start making one of my own, hoping the idea will spread once again. Hmm, ponder ponder... 

Yeah, that's the spirit! :D Maybe getting some people to help you if it's too complicated. Since this web revival thing is very niche and some people into personal websites weren't even born when they were popular, the easiest way of bringing things back to life is through the hands-on approach and building a community.

[ValyceNegative]

I'll definitely look into it! As it's been mentioned, topsites were divided into categories or even dedicated to just one subject and while fansites were the most popular thing back then I think nowadays artist pages could better benefit from something like that; a whole list where visitors can show support to their favourite styles by making them climb the leaderboard. I could even add sites manually via email submission, but what most confuses me is the voting/ranking method since I'd have no idea how to code it. I bet Javascript's involved <.< time to study.

[Strange]

I know its a VERY old thread, but did this end up going anywhere? Curious if anyone brought a top site back?

[ValyceNegative]

Hi @Strange ! Sadly my venture into making a topsite myself was cut short xD

The system obviously needs user login to allow people to submit their sites and cast votes, something that I'm not keen on building/managing myself. As I said in the previous posts I imagined I could bypass this by allowing participants to send entries and votes via email, but obviously that can get very crazy very fast, so I was a little stumped on my project.

I went ahead and focused on another staple of old web which are adoptables, so I have left the topsite project aside, but I haven't forgotten about it: I've been suggested to make one, but the suggestion should be open to anyone that want to try building topsites themselves. I would even love to work alongside a team that would like to build and manage a topsite, if needed. I can provide graphics, that's my shtick xP

[Strange]

Ooh ok! Thank you for getting back to me. And yeah that makes sense. I suppose you could have a team of moderators who could sift through applications that are anonymous, but again it require some level of trust and anonymous stuff is always open to abuse, specially over time/if they get popular :/

There must be another way, just can't think of it right now

[Melooon]

The system obviously needs user login to allow people to submit their sites and cast votes, something that I'm not keen on building/managing myself.

If you are up to building the rest of it, iv been working of a system that lets ML members create their own web sites that use melonland accounts instead of needing to create their own system ^^ its still wip but if you wanna pm me feel free tooo!

[ValyceNegative]

If you are up to building the rest of it, iv been working of a system that lets ML members create their own web sites that use melonland accounts instead of needing to create their own system ^^ its still wip but if you wanna pm me feel free tooo!

Hm! So it would be like building a topsite inside ML for the forum members to join and vote?

[Melooon]

Hm! So it would be like building a topsite inside ML for the forum members to join and vote?

Kinda! The best example would be the banner system we have here - that's using an early prototype of the shared login, you can ignore that fact its hosted on the forums domain, that's just because it was convenient - its actually an entirely separate site/service from the forum, it just happens to automatically use your forum account when you connect to it.

So from your perspective, if you were coding in PHP, you'd get a php function to check like getUserInfo() and it would return the username + account number of someone if they are logged in on the forum on that computer, or empty if they are not logged in. After that you can use that info however you like to make your site work, you don't need to think bout logins at all.

The idea was that it would allow people to create micro-services like the banners without all the hassle of making new accounts for everything.

[ValyceNegative]

That's amazing! At the moment I actually have my hands full with other projects but if no one jumps in to take the occasion in the meanwhile, I'd love to try it out in the future!

[ヤーナム]

If anyone is interested in helping me test it, I've been working on a project that is spiritually inspired by old topsite software! It's called linklists.net, and it lets people build and collaborate on web directories ("link lists").

https://linklists.net

It lets you add links to a database and organize/filter them by tag, invite other users to join and collaborate (and set permissions for them), there are talk pages to help with collaborating ("should we include this link or no?"), and a lot more. It's far from complete but I just launched it publicly a few weeks ago. I've been working on one for collecting independent internet forums and it's the most fleshed out example right now: https://indieforums.linklists.net

It's still in alpha testing so it requires invite codes, but if anyone is interested let me know / send me a PM and I'll give you an invite to join. :D Once you have an account on linklists.net you can create as many lists as you want and invite your friends to join and collaborate with you.

It's heavily inspired by my love of the early web and the current indie web, so you can fully customize the CSS of your lists to make them unique. Each list is its own separate world (its own subdomain, database, and users) so they're very intentionally built to be ran by the founder however they see fit. I wanted to avoid link aggregator vibes so they're meant to be small groups of people working together to make libraries of useful/interesting links. Less "here's a news article I read today" and more "here are some cool websites you can visit".

It's been fun to build and I'd love to have people try it out. <3

[girlblogzone]

topsides are what allows me to discover a lot of video games as a kid because you could also vote for games on some of these sites  anyways, I feel like there must be a way to build something like this that doesn't require a user to log in. there are already some little widgets that let people put likes on a website without logging in, and I believe it saves through cache, but idk how to go about translating the likes into a ranked list that actively changes 

the links list is cool, maybe we can figure out a compromise between something that requires a login and organizes automatically, and something that requires manual ranking (if that makes sense sorry)

let us combine our braincells