Y2K Final Fantasy Fansite Directory — 609 Sites Recovered from Six Dead Topsite Directories (2001–2007)

Between roughly 2001 and 2007, FinalFantasyFanatic.com was a ranked member of five topsite directories: FF Mages (member 259), RPG Dreamer (17), Anime-Pinas (245), RPG Genesis (76), and FF Republic (94). Topsite directories were CGI ranking scripts that let fan sites trade traffic — you displayed the directory's button, the script counted the pageviews it appeared on, and the count set your position in the list. All of those directories are dead. Their ranking pages survive only as Wayback Machine captures.

Those captures turn out to be a census of the Y2K Final Fantasy web. The full recovered roster lists 609 fan sites, 352 of them carrying a description their own owner wrote by hand, in English, Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese. Nearly all of these sites are gone, and for most of them this listing is the only place their name, their self-description, and their address still exist together.

309 of those addresses were recovered from a detail nobody intended as a record. The directories linked members through a redirect (topsites.cgi?action=out&id=259), so the real URLs died with the directory databases. But each member hosted their own button on their own server, and the listing embedded it by absolute URL — so the img tag still carries the domain the redirect destroyed. Where a button lived on a free host (GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod, Altervista), the entry says so, because the host's capture history is not the site's.

Every entry cites the archived capture it was read from, and the file lists all 280 archived ranking pages the roster was parsed out of, so no claim in it depends on trusting it. FinalFantasyFanatic.com's own placements are documented alongside — including September 6, 2002, when RPG Dreamer ran it as Featured Member, and the Anime-Pinas per-site stats page of September 12, 2002 that recorded 222 pageviews a day against one or two actual click-throughs.