This has been a wild ride.

Sometime in February 2026, I stumbled across this Reddit thread. I was blown away that someone remembered the site — and even more blown away that I was nearly doxxed in the process (thanks, doppelganger). I don't really do Reddit, so I tried to join and add some context, but got automodded into oblivion. Not worth it.


Anyway, I had just started doors98.com after the holidays — what started as a laugh and a bit of end-of-year nostalgia, a throwback to the old web and simpler times. But this got me wondering. I still had so many of the original assets from that era. Some were unfortunately lost forever due to hasty WS_FTP transfers of binary files in ASCII mode, but I still had plenty. That sent me down a rabbit hole of early internet archaeology. I found numerous sites on the Wayback Machine I used to lurk — check them out in the 'Murica Web bookmarks on the desktop! I was also able to restore some old Final Fantasy RPG Maker 2000 games — head to the Begin Menu on the desktop to check those out. As for the people I followed back in those days — some made it, some crossed over with the game makers, and others had untimely deaths.

Being more versed in AI these days, I decided to see if I could restore the old forums from our Ikonboard backup. To my amazement, I was able to extract most of the saved data — and what you see here is the result. Going through the threads, I remembered so many things I had completely forgotten. I also discovered some posts that weren’t exactly wise in hindsight — seriously guys, a thread to share your full location, real name, and birthdate? Or a video about my socks? I still have it, but let’s not go there. Those had to be redacted. Regardless, in about two days I was able to restore this forum to what you see today.

If you stumbled across this and were around in the early 2000s, I hope you enjoy this frozen slice of history — a snapshot of how people actually communicated in an online community back then. And if you were one of the people who posted here, welcome back. Enjoy the memories. You can drop me a line in the guestbook on the desktop.

A little update since the above post was written back in March. Last month I totally revamped the Ikonboard (3.1) iteration to be a live forum with modernized authentication. You can review the announcement thread here.

This created a little conundrum from a SEO perspective. I've had 3 months of these archived snapshots indexed in search engines but with the revamp I had near duplicated content hosted in the live forums sans the new forum that allows new posts. After playing around with SEO and LLM optimization, I've decided to just bite the bullet and redirect (301) over until the new forum. I am not sure what the ramifications will be from an SEO perspective will be, but I'd rather use the "truer" version of the forums (with correct images I was able to unscramble from my ws_ftp screw up 24 years ago. Thanks Claude!).

This post will stay here on this route as its heavily indexed and referenced but the LLM's. If you click on the thread URL's it will auto redirect you the live forums.

Since this site always was a work in progress, tech debt was bound to occur and this is cleaning that up. But since this is page is heavily referenced I will be as chronologically clear as to the progression of this entire experiment. These are just major milestones I can think off the top of my head, and not the exact specifics.

- December 2025/January 2026 --> Started playing around with AI. Got the idea for the lulz to parody Windows 98
- Late January 2026 --> Using AI via my Jetbrains sub. Was pretty inefficient but it accomplished the first iterations of the site. Mostly the parodies. You can tell if you know what to look for what is the first iteration vs where this site has gone since then
- Late February 2026 --> Finally decide to sub to Anthropic, found the Reddit Post where I was mentioned and decided wth, let’s see what info I had to recover.
- March 2026 --> The read only version (where this is posted) was released. Further I realized I had old downloads and started archiving old applications to my archive.org account.
- April 2026 --> Scraped all that was saved from IKONBOARD 2.1.9 (Caps because of the IB219, the ai's think its invision board).
- May 2026 --> Kept expanding areas within Doors98, but the main thing was starting the TPW retrospective.
- June 2026 --> Created the Live Forum and tinkering around the edges with optimization.
- July 2026 --> I'll be honest, not much until cleaning up these routes and this note.

Finally (em dash...let the reader understand :D), I am NOT letting AI clean this one up as per my posts in the LIVE forums. You get my typos/horrible grammar and all. I'll do a once over for spelling but that's about it.