Project Information Part #2

[Ana]

As part of the authentic PRO ANA EXPERIENCE there were a number of things that needed to be included, with a few more still being worked on.

[Authentic 1999-era BANNER ADS]
Yes, these are real, they're animated, and they are exactly what you would see in the 1999-2001 era, including banner ads for the ORIGINAL "Sims", including a Y2K-themed one. There are about a half-dozen ads so feel free to refresh the page.

[Authentic 1999-era Web Ring]
WTF is a "Web Ring"?
Web Rings are pre-Google. They allowed individual sites to sign up at a centralized 3rd-party web ring hub under various topics (such as Pro-Ana web rings). Then after you signed up, ndividual sites would place some code in their page to become part of the ring.

This would allow site users to find a single Pro-Ana site and then surf the "ring" to all the other sites on the same ring, the previous site, the next site, or a randomly picked site on the ring. It was easy (too easy) to create your own web ring so there were many competing Pro-Ana web rings. The most famous though was one created by the House of Sins Pro-Ana major site.

On CoA this "Butterfly *~Anaz~* Web Ring" is simulated, albeit using authentic 1999-era decentralized web ring code that actually goes randomly to a few other random Pro-Ana pages! A de-centralized Ring required all the ring sites to manually update and program their list so they weren't very common versus the centralized 3rd-party Web Ring providers. However, pretty much all the centralized Web Ring companies are dead, lol.

[Web Badges]
The #1 purpose of a Web Badge was to help identify which browser (Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer) your site was compatible with. Better sites supported both. Primitive sites required two separate copies of the site code and two separate entrances to support one browser or another. Better sites detected which browser you had and ran the right code.

Web Badges were also used like bumper stickers on cars, or "scause" bracelets advertising your support for things like animal rights, free speech, etc.

Basically it was a less extreme form of "virtue signally" (in 2021-terms) and Web Badges were extremely popular in personalizing one's website (Pro-Ana or otherwise).

The larger banners at the bottom of the page link to the actual content (Archived, of course) that they originally linked to.

[Guestbook]
Yes, sites used to have Guest Books, lol, especially Pro-Ana sites. These were very important as it allowed visitors to communicate with site owners (since not all sites had a forum) and it encouraged visitors to do so by allowing them to put in their own URL for their own Pro-Ana page.

This provided the drive for so many to MAKE their own Geocities page so they could have an online page to put next to their Guest Book entry.

Sign the guestbook! PLLLLLEEEEEASE!!!

And while you're there take a look at the AUTHENTIC collection of comments from 2002. The names are fake, but the comments are 100% real. Hate comments were overwhelming part of a Pro-Ana Guestbook from "recovery" folks and teenage boys trolling Pro-Ana sites.

And of course Guest Book complaints from other Pro-Ana site owners about Guestbooks owner's site stealing their content without attributing it to them, was also very important.

Finally, Guest Books were the major source of people finding "Ana Buddies".

[Web Counter]
Yes, it's a web counter from the late 1990s, and it's authentic and works.

[Mouse Animation]
If on a computer, the mouse on the main page and on the Guestbook shows an animated butterfly, a common feature on Pro-Ana sites, although many sites instead had stars or sparkles for the mouse.

[Music]
Individual Pro-Ana free Geocities-style pages almost always had autoplaying background MIDI music. Digital music (like MP3s) were generally not used because they would take much longer to load.

Autoplaying background music became so hated and abused by people that it takes numerous tricks to even get it to autoplay on Chrome, and it won't autoplay on Apple devices by default (at least with my limited level of tricks). Be sure and use the music player at the top of the web page!

[Animated GIFs]
Many Pro-Ana sites were very cutesy, something the media loved to attack them on for allegedly trying to lure impressionable teenage girls). A staple of this was animated GIF pictures. Most of the animated GIFs here were custom made.

Although plenty of later sites would steal other sites' GIFs, it was very common for people to make their own animations and thinspo animated badges for use on sites like Xanga. It's much easier to create animated GIFs in 2021 than it was for most people back in 1999, however for those that could create their own...you were awesome!

[Quotes]
A collection of authentic Thinspo quotes! Most are from the exact 1999 target period (though there are a few later ones).

[Tips & Tricks]
A hallmark of any Pro-Ana site was its Tips & Tricks. This collection here is actually, intentionally, the WORST and most stereotypical of the butterfly tips! One could say cringey, but cringey wasn't even a word used back in 1999 (that was still a DECADE away).

It's a rather fake stereotype that PrO-AnAZ uSEd eLITe cAPiTALs during the golden age of Pro-Ana by 1999. Literally, about 1% of pages used it (though it was more common on 1996-1997 AOL).

One of the actual purposes of it was to obfuscate the quotes to make them less easily readable to the parent who might walk by behind you when using the family computer.

[Chat]
There's a chat! It works. Most larger Pro-Ana community-based sites starting in 2001 did add a chat, and/or a forum. In 1999 though, it would have been extremely bleeding edge.

For "Chat" that's AIM, MSN, and ICQ rooms were for. Some even used IRC.

[Forum]
The true hallmark of a Pro-Ana site taken to the next level was to have a website forum starting in 2001. Most of the time these were free-hosted forums and most forums were lost as Pro-Ana became the #1 banned type of content on the Internet.

Prior to 2001 most Pro-Ana forums were technically Yahoo or MSN "Groups" (Clubs) pages that were exclusively centered around the forum, but they would often have a companion web page, especially for the purpose of posting thinspo gallery images and Tips & Tricks.