https://cohost.org/mcc/post/325362-a-one-person-oral-hi

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andi

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andi@mcc11/17/2022, 11:12 PM
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A one-person oral history of Geocities HTML Chat

The "Image not found" graphic from Netscape 4.

Geocities HTML Chat has been forgotten by the world. It is possible I
am the only one who remembers it. I only half remember it. It was my
first Internet community.

Here is what I remember.

Background

 1. Geocities was a formative website for the older millennials who
    are just barely old enough to remember when the "web browser" was
    introduced, but not old enough to be adults when it happened. It
    wasn't a very good site.

    Geocities was the first, or at least biggest, of the "free web
    hosts" of the early Internet. Anyone could sign up for a
    pittance-small (5 megabytes? 10 megabytes?) web directory, and
    FTP up their HTML and GIF files and Geocities would host it raw
    and unaltered. Geocities sites had the ugliest URLs on the
    Internet. Each URL consisted of the user's "city", followed by a
    four-digit number Geocities assigned. The "cities" were broad
    categories indicating the type of content your site would
    contain, like "SiliconValley" for computers, "WestHollywood" for
    LGBT topics, or... "Tokyo"1. The categories seemed ill-thought-out
    and lumpy. The existence of "NapaValley" seemed to indicate they
    believed there would be roughly as many sites about wine as about
    all computer-related subjects combined.

    These "cities" seem to have been part of a very vague desire to
    conceptualize Geocities' very basic service (HTTP file hosting)
    as in fact a collection of communities. The people who made
    Geocities had some kind of sense the social web would, or could,
    someday exist. They could smell it, they could feel the heat of
    the thing in the room with them. They just had no idea what it
    would look like. Leaping from flat file hosting to something that
    looks like "social" "media" requires interactivity, and that was
    just not really available in webtech at that early point.
    Cross-page communities were things stitched in by hand (like the
    "webrings" the Mastodon crowd loves so much; these littered
    Geocities and invariably consisted of 50% dead links). "CGI-BIN"
    existed, on some sites (not Geocities), but all it could do was
    generate new flat files, so people largely only used CGI for the
    most basic purposes: "Guestbooks" where you could leave your name
    and a bit of text which would be appended to the HTML of the
    guestbook page; mindlessly simple "counters" which would generate
    on each load a GIF containing a number one higher than the last
    one loaded, showing how many people had visited that page.

    If you're old enough to remember this time, you're kind of
    nodding off at this point in the post. You know all this. But you
    probably did not know about Geocities HTML Chat, and if you knew
    it existed and what it was you probably would be actually
    shocked. I'm not sure you're even going to believe me this was a
    real thing that existed.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

The thing itself

 2. Geocities HTML Chat was the only "community" feature I remember
    Geocities ever attempting other than the mere fact of the "city"
    names. Most Geocities users didn't seem to know the chat was
    there. The concept was simplicity itself.

    Geocities HTML Chat was, from a technical perspective, a
    guestbook with a small twist. There was a chat for each of the
    "cities" (my home was SiliconValley, I think?). Each chat used
    (of course) frames to display two smaller webpages. One frame
    above (I don't actually remember, but let's say it was above) was
    a thin band containing a CGI input form. The lower frame was
    larger, and scrolled freely. This frame used a server-side trick;
    the server would tell your web browser it was sending it an
    infinitely long web page (or maybe it just claimed it was some
    impossibly large size, a gigabyte or something). It would send it
    the opening <html>, and then it would hang. It would keep the
    socket open. When a user in the chat room submitted a line to
    their CGI box, every user would simultaneously receive a new line
    on the bottom-frame open socket (which their web browser
    sincerely believed an ordinary webpage was actually really
    loading into, just very slowly):

        <br><br>Nickname: Chat Text

    And so, a chat room. Any user hits "submit", what they submitted
    appears on all our screens at once. Cute trick, you're thinking.
    They've just faked a dynamically loading chatroom without using
    any dynamic HTML features at all. But you've missed the important
    part.

    When a user submits text, it is forwarded to everyone's
    chatscroll frame unchanged.

    There was no input sanitization at all.

 3. Think like a Cohost user. Imagine the most extreme way you could
    use, or abuse, a chat room in which anything you say may contain
    unsanitized HTML.

    Whatever you're thinking, we did it.

    On GeoCities HTML chat you could use raw HTML in your chat posts.
    You could use raw HTML in your nickname. Most people did. Most
    users' nicknames contained images.

    You could do anything.

 4. goodmorning.gifI had a particular trick I liked. I'd figured out
    I could align=right an <img> and it would "float" right and text
    would flow around it. So I had a little html block I'd
    occasionally begin my chats with that would float right a GIF I
    liked (hosted, of course, off my personal website; it was the
    System 7 "Finder icon" of a one-piece Macintosh, on a green hill,
    with a mushroom cloud erupting behind it) and that GIF would link
    to my personal webpage. It was normal (and acceptable) for people
    to post recurring, banner-like HTML adverts of their
    announcements and websites; Geocities HTML Chat had no history,
    there were no logs, so repetition was the only way to make
    something seen. This was my version of that, but it was subtle,
    and could fit right into whatever else I was saying at the time.
    I could have put the float-right GIF in my nickname, of course,
    if I'd wanted, but that would be overbearing.
 5. Because inputs were unsanitized and HTML was allowed, a
    semi-common problem was that people would open HTML tags and
    forget to close them. A stray < would be no problem, that would
    only result in the rest of that person's chat being deleted up to
    the next <br>, but if someone said <i> but forgot to (or typoed)
    their </i> then the chat would simply be in italics, everyone's
    chats, until someone posted a </i>. Flubbing tag closure was seen
    as an embarrassing faux pas, no worse, and moderators and
    experienced users simply saw it as one of their community duties
    to notice left-open tags and post a corresponding close tag.

    This did, obviously, leave room for griefing, but less than you'd
    think, because this was the HTML 2.0 era and there simply wasn't
    enough in the HTML standard yet to allow for truly major abuses.
    CSS didn't exist yet. About the worst someone could do would be
    to use an "obscure" tag, <abbr> or something, which would result
    in a visible formatting difference but leave the high level users
    confused as they spammed various close tags without guessing the
    right one. I think occasionally it would occur to someone to post
    a <!-- comment open, which would entirely silence the chat until
    someone figured out what had happened. But such abuses were
    always easily identified and quickly dealt with, the user would
    be banned and that would be that. In a worst case scenario you
    could always just reload the page, erasing the history and any
    stray formatting, and in the normal case, you just got used to
    the idea that sometimes, the chat would simply be purple for a
    bit.

 6. I was a regular on the chat for what I remember being years, and
    I made any number of friends there, but I actually only remember
    one specific user from that entire time, and that was "MC Skat
    Kat". MC Skat Kat, as you may know, was Paula Abdul's cartoon
    boyfriend from the music video for "Opposites Attract", not one
    of my favorite Paula Abdul songs.

                              Animated GIF
               MC Skat Kat (left) and Paula Abdul (right).
     Note that this animated GIF is modern, and could never possibly
      have existed in the Geocities HTML Chat era; it's simply too
    large. At 280 pixels tall it is over half the height of a 640x480
     monitor, and the file itself clocks in at a simply unmanageable
                            995 kilobytes(!).

    MC Skat Kat is a literal cat, and also a rapper. Our MC Skat Kat
    posted from the persona of this fictional MC Skat Kat, regularly
    referring to Paula Abdul as his girlfriend. Everyone simply
    accepted this. I don't think this was a furry thing, or rather,
    the human behind MC Skat Kat probably didn't at that time have
    the language of "furry" or the "furry community" available to
    him. He had simply decided that he was MC Skat Kat, and everyone
    went along with it. His nickname contained, if my memory can be
    trusted, two images of MC Skat Kat, to the left and right of his
    specially-formatted name, taking up maybe a third of an average
    screen.

    MC Skat Kat was a community pillar, and the most active among the
    volunteer moderators.

 7. I'm only just remembering this as I'm typing, and the memory is
    so vague I'm not entirely certain this part is real, but this is
    what my neurons are telling me: When a moderator kicked someone
    from the room I remember there being a big <h3>

             User "nickname" has been kicked from the chat.

    announcement.

    There was of course nothing stopping you from simply, at any
    point, saying "User 'nickname' has been kicked from the chat." in
    h3 text. It wouldn't have any effect, but you could do it. I
    don't even think the mods cared.
 8. Geocities HTML Chat puttered along in its gleeful, endless,
    rainbow-colored utter chaos until one day, all at once, the end
    came for it, without warning and very rapidly over a 48-hour
    period. You've probably already guessed the reason why.
    JavaScript. When Geocities HTML Chat was created, JavaScript did
    not exist. But then there came a time JavaScript existed, and
    then inevitably, there came a day that for the first time someone
    thought to use JavaScript in the chat room.

    My memories get a little fuzzy about exactly when this happened.
    What I think I remember was that there was a period that
    JavaScript had been introduced but lay dormant, and people only
    started to pay attention and learn it once Netscape 4 landed and
    "Dynamic HTML" got introduced. DHTML is now such a basic concept
    of the Internet you have to specifically explain there was a time
    it didn't exist; the concept of the DOM, and JavaScript being
    able to alter and rearrange a document structure after it has
    already been rendered as opposed to appending all at once as
    brutal one-off document.write()s. What I think I remember was
    that when the event happened I had some awareness I was partially
    immune to the consequences due to me staying for a time on
    Netscape 3 (due to Netscape 4 being slow and me liking a
    particular 3.0-exclusive mod I'd installed that transformed the
    browser into "Xena Navigator" and replaced the "loading" icon
    with a spinning Chakram). (I was literally twelve). DHTML,
    despite being practically useless in its early incarnation due to
    Netscape and IE offering mutually incompatible implementations,
    would have been really dangerous, not just because of its
    intended capabilities but because in those early DHTML browsers
    it was incredibly, unbelievably easy to find ways to use DHTML to
    make the browser crash. And as any modern programmer knows, if
    you can find a way to remotely crash a program, the chances are
    good you have a handle on a way to remotely execute code. I'm not
    sure though if Netscape 4 actually had been released when the
    event happened; that would have dated the event I'm about to
    describe to 1997, whereas honestly it might have been closer to
    1995. But whether this was 1995 or 1997, and whether I was using
    Netscape Communicator 4 or Xena Navigator 3 at the time, doesn't
    really matter to the story. Even Netscape 3.0 supported alert().
    And in those days, there was no way to escape a while (1) { alert
    () } loop except to force quit the browser.

    What I definitely remember is that one day, sitting in the chat,
    somebody posted a JavaScript alert(). This appeared once or twice
    more over the course of an evening. I don't specifically remember
    if I myself encountered someone putting alert() in a loop, but
    sometime that evening in one of the "cities" someone must have
    tried it. Within 24 hours of that first alert() being posted,
    Geocities HTML Chat was gone. Geocities simply removed it from
    the Internet. We had no indication what was happening, nowhere to
    go for news, it wasn't like there was a forum somewhere we could
    switch over to. The chat was our one way of reaching each other,
    and it was gone. About 48 hours after the takedown, the Geocities
    chat URL suddenly went back up, this time hosting a completely
    different, Java-based chat app that had clearly been set up in an
    incredible hurry.

    We were devastated. The Java applet was just not the same. It not
    only lacked the Godmode formatting capabilities of the old HTML
    Chat, it had no formatting at all. And it was slow, and clunky,
    and flickered constantly, because it was a Java applet. But
    Geocities was indifferent to our complaints. What is clear in
    retrospect is that Geocities probably literally did not have the
    ability to fix the HTML chat. Easy as it is to forget today,
    "internet companies" and websites in 1995-1997 were not by nature
    software developers. Many companies that ran websites probably
    had no software developers on staff at all. Whoever originally
    wrote the obviously tiny UNIX C program that must have powered
    the HTML chat-- take in HTTP POST on socket A, push received bytes
    directly to sockets B through Q, do nothing else-- probably no
    longer even worked at the company, and if they did, they probably
    lacked the technical skill to make the program any smarter than
    it was. Sanitizing HTML input is not trivial, and the best
    practices for it weren't developed yet then. Geocities did not
    actively maintain, and probably at an executive level did not
    even understand, this thing that they were hosting, until one day
    they suddenly discovered they were hosting a chat app where any
    griefer could at any time irrecoverably lock up every user's web
    browser. So they did the only thing they could do, which was to
    download or license as quickly as possible an off-the-shelf chat
    solution, which of course was not going to be anything like
    Geocities HTML Chat because nothing, before or since, has ever
    been like Geocities HTML Chat. No one would ever create something
    like Geocities HTML Chat on purpose. It's simply too bad an idea.

    I don't know how long the Java-based Geocities Chat endured, or
    what if any community it formed. My community was dead. The very
    few of us who could get the Java chat to run at all met up in the
    new SiliconValley room over the day or so after the relaunch,
    said our tearful goodbyes to each other, and departed. It was
    over.

    I took up IRC.

 9. What, if anything, to take away from this?

    Geocities HTML Chat changed my life. I'd used BBS-like
    communities with message boards before, I had a web page (not on
    Geocities) before I found the chat. But this was the community I
    imprinted on. It was my first experience with the Web as
    something immediate, realtime, where a web page meant being in a
    place, with other people. It got me used to a mode of being
    online as an ever-flowing stream you dip in and out of, where you
    simply lay back and let a world wash over you.

    But more than that. As a community chat app, it gave me an
    entirely unrealistic expectation of user freedom that nothing
    that followed has ever lived up to. On Geocities HTML Chat, every
    user was a god. The powers an individual user had there were not
    verbs granted by the app, the power was ours, inherent, we could
    reach out and reshape the matter of the place itself without
    limitation. Other than kicking (terminating a connection) there
    was nothing the site administrators could do that we could not,
    in that place.

    There is some very small way that every website, or online
    community I've used since has been, a little bit, a
    disappointment. I tasted true freedom, once, and BBCode or even
    Cohost's security-boxed HTML passthrough, however generous,
    cannot live up to it. Someone once taught me that the proper form
    of the Internet is a thing where each individual person can do
    anything, up to and including eventually destroying the space
    itself. When I use, or design, online applications, I am
    dissatisfied with anything other than total scriptability. I
    dream of Twitter clones with LocalStorage-sandboxed user
    JavaScript and arbitrary server-side metadata storage that would
    let you design secondary apps attached to profiles, embed Twine
    games in individual posts. I look at VRChat or Second Life and
    all I see is the limitations in the sandboxed scripting, the
    points where a VRChat employee could write a tiny AI chatbot to
    follow you around but the end user with their tinkertoy
    primitives cannot. I develop anything at all for the modern Web
    and all I can think about is the variety of things a native
    application can do with ease but Apple denies me in my
    web-sandboxed jail.

    Within me rages a tiny, twelve-year-old god, now squashed into
    human shape, unable to comprehend where its powers have gone, and
    nothing less than everything is satisfying.

1 "Tokyo" was the only Asia-related category; either they thought no
one would be talking about Asia unless it was to talk about anime, or
they assumed everyone talking about Asia-related subjects would be
happy condensing under "Tokyo". Note of course there would be
absolutely zero websites by actual Japanese users in the Tokyo
community, since those users would be using geocities.jp, which had
its own twenty "cities" and managed to survive a good nine years
longer than geocities dot com, sunsetting in 2018 to .com's 2009.

#geocities#GeoCities HTML Chat#injection attack#AndiBlogs#Paula Abdul
#MC Skat Kat
see all
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29 comments
 
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in reply to @mcc's post:

namelessWrench
namelessWrench
A Jeb With No Name@namelessWrench11/17/2022, 11:15 PM

You've just unlocked a memory I thought I had buried for good.

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confusedcharlot
confusedcharlot
Charlotte the Useless Ghost @confusedcharlot11/17/2022, 11:29 PM

i think i would have been served better by this than all the text
terminal time i got.

web pages and guis have always been 2nd or 3rd languages to me

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JamesFnX
JamesFnX
James F'n X @JamesFnX11/17/2022, 11:31 PM

I don't remember this, but I was deep in the IRC wormhole starting in
like 1995, so I don't think this would have captivated me if I had
found it.

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DecayWTF
DecayWTF
Illegal Taco Disease@DecayWTF11/17/2022, 11:34 PM

I miss this shit. I understand why no one would risk running
something like that these days; imagine someone installing a Bitcoin
miner of the computers of an army of kids who don't know why their
computer runs like absolute dogshit every time @MelonHusk logs in.
But I miss it. I miss when posting "+++ATH0" in IRC still had a
non-zero chance of making someone log off; roll the dice if you're on
dialup, maybe you log off depending on how your PPP frames line up,
maybe Grognard from Finland who comes in from a dialup shell account
and doesn't even have the thin protection of PPP framing does
instead. It was all in good fun.

I understand why we can't have nice things. But I miss it.

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the-mess-express
the-mess-express
The Mess Express@the-mess-express11/18/2022, 7:21 PM

Actually! It happened in a community I'm a part of, someone made a
joke chat that happened to be pretty much unsanitized html. I can't
remember if it's still online (It was sometime last year) but it was
etiquette to mess with it constantly, within limits. It being
unsanitized was entirely by accident and stayed there because it was
funny.

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klara
klara
Klara@klara11/17/2022, 11:39 PM

Damn, now I'm trying to remember whether I just barely missed this or
whether I saw it but never explored it while I had the chance.

(Also definitely gonna imagine a "what have you done to me / I am a
hideousness" from you every time I see you on a new website, thanks.)

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Ackart
Ackart
Ackart@Ackart11/17/2022, 11:40 PM

This is an amazing write up. My own trajectory went from AOL chats to
IRC pretty fast, but I think we can all relate to the sudden loss of
community. No matter what chat you were apart of, it happened and it
probably happened suddenly. Thank you for posting this.

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SubjectNerd
SubjectNerd
Jeiel Aranal@SubjectNerd11/17/2022, 11:50 PM

I don't have anything as amazing as this story, but there was a time
where I knew how to do the IRC handshake protocol by heart so that I
could log into IRC through a bare telnet client. LAN shops were big
at that time and they didn't always have an IRC client installed when
my social circle was in IRC. It was a neat way to quickly check in
with internet friends while I was playing CounterStrike with real
life friends.

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mcc
mcc
andi@mcc11/17/2022, 11:54 PM

Yeah, I did exactly this for years with POP3. This was great because
when you connect a normal email client it downloads all emails and
deletes them from the server, but if you're typing in POP3 commands
by hand you can decide to selectively delete spam but leave the
"real" emails up for your home email to download later.
(Theoretically I could have also sent emails with SMTP but that was a
more complicated protocol and I never got the hang of it.)

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softfennec
softfennec
authentic soft fennec friend brand fennecs@softfennec11/18/2022,
12:01 AM

So, this made me think about something silly. These days you could
totally write a (comparatively) simple HTML renderer in something
that compiles to wasm. You could then plug a network connection into
that html renderer to receive stuff, and probably the sending bit
could just be handled by your normal web browser.

You'd lose out on a lot of the features of a normal web browser (I
imagine there would be some way to get clicked links out of this wasm
application, but I have no idea how) but like. You could simulate
something like this.

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porglezomp
porglezomp
cassie@porglezomp11/18/2022, 12:02 AM

Huh it seems like you could build this exact same thing again safely
(?) by using <iframe sandbox>.

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vectorpoem
vectorpoem
JP@vectorpoem11/18/2022, 12:47 AM

imagining a Silmarillion-esque cosmology wherein the Age of Gods, the
Age of Legends, the Age of Heroes, and the present age were all just
different levels of user privileges and sandboxing.

(disclaimer: i've never read homestuck and don't know anything about
it, so if it already did this idea then i plead ignorance.)

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pieartsy
pieartsy
aster@pieartsy11/20/2022, 2:47 AM

the age of losers

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v21
v21
v@v2111/18/2022, 1:23 AM

I spent a lot of my time growing up online and until maybe 2008 on a
small forum/communal weblog I will not name out of shame. It was not
real time, but it also didn't do any HTML validation on comments -
but it did hide downvoted comments by default. It turns out that, in
this community, that was enough? A few times people did something
devious, like post an img posting to a URL that would downvote
someone else's comment, but even that got spotted and collectively
downvoted into invisibility.

(I just realised it's a little broken that that isn't a POST only
endpoint, but the whole backend was very jankily written, and spent
long periods of time effectively abandoned by the owner/admin, so)

Anyway, I also miss people closing other people's tags for them.

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ykarps
ykarps
@ykarps11/18/2022, 2:41 AM

this is amazing, thank you for writing this

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blazehedgehog
blazehedgehog
BlazeHedgehog@blazehedgehog11/18/2022, 4:42 AM

I either forgot or never knew Geocities did this. For me, it was Xoom
/Beseen webchat. I guess it was probably kind of like Geocities,
because I remember instead of neighborhoods, it was planets. The chat
I frequented the most was on Jupiter, I think. The Beseen chat was a
normal webpage with a refresh command that would trigger every 5
seconds, and there was a button to manually refresh it in order to
check for new chat messages. It WAS very proto-social-media, in
retrospect.

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fahickman
fahickman
Alan Hickman@fahickman11/18/2022, 4:44 AM

I spent a ton of time on geocities chat as a young teen. Met a couple
lifelong friends there, in fact.

They actually did try to sanitize the html a bit. If you inspected
the source, you'd see every post start with </i></color></b> and so
on. They also added an option to put an <hr> tag between posts so you
could tell when someone was trying to impersonate someone else with
<br>. You had to opt in to this, though.

I remember when the teardrop vulnerability came out, I would post an
href to an image hosted on my Linux box. The Apache logs would show
me the referrer url of everyone in the chat room, along with their
ip. Then I could crash the computer of whichever chatters I didn't
like. They eventually put a stop to this by blocking hrefs to ip
addresses.

There was another website that used the same software--it was called
L'Hotel. They seemed to have slightly more sophisticated sanitization
than geocities, thus it was a lot more boring.

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fahickman
fahickman
Alan Hickman@fahickman11/18/2022, 4:46 AM

(Ah, cohost ate my html tags and I'm too lazy to fix them all).

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mcc
mcc
andi@mcc11/18/2022, 4:52 AM

Note, an easy way to post raw html on Cohost is to wrap backticks
around the thing you want to post raw.

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fahickman
fahickman
Alan Hickman@fahickman11/18/2022, 5:00 AM

Thanks!

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-12
-12
@-1211/18/2022, 5:15 AM

I love how the "infinitely long http response" trick still works
extremely well for sending real-time messages from server -> client
(in the form of "long polling")
(except now you'll usually close and reopen the request after a
message is recieved)

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bdwl
bdwl
Ben@bdwl11/18/2022, 7:05 AM

I would have loved this! The earliest chat room I remember was
probably using javascript, since I don't remember it being an applet.
For some reason I think this was on foxtrot.com (the website for the
comic strip), but I could be misremembering. It was associated with
the comic, anyway. There was no user authentication, so you could
take any name not in use, but it was a faux pas to take someone
else's username. When it grew large enough I could no longer reliably
get my desired name, and it had mostly devolved to a never ending "a/
s/l?" I left. I wasn't smart enough to figure out IRC by myself at
the time.

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tipsheda
tipsheda
shane yach@tipsheda11/18/2022, 7:50 AM

Thank you for writing this. It's a wonderful look into a little bit
of web history I never could have known. Thanks for keeping this bit
of history alive.

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darkprimus
darkprimus
David@darkprimus11/18/2022, 2:51 PM

A look back onto times wonderous and awesome. These early communities
had a sort of purity in their chaos.

A publicly accessible space where people were able to truly test the
limits of what they were capable of in the medium. Which is
admittedly kind of terrifying in retrospect, but you certainly give
the impression that the harm that could be caused WAS limited,
relatively speaking, due to the tech of the time.

Well, until someone figured out how to break the whole thing wide
open, I guess. But even then, I have to wonder if it was done with
understanding of the gravity of the action.

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alterae
alterae
chell@alterae11/18/2022, 4:49 PM

thank you for sharing this. i never got to experience those days but
i love learning about one

(though i did experience the joy of unsanitized html chats when my
friend built a chatroom back in high school, and there really was
something beautiful about it)

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verydragons
verydragons
#1 agon@verydragons11/27/2022, 7:18 AM

I was on the early Internet at way too young an age. My mom was in
some of the very first Internet chat rooms, and I found them through
her. They were the kind you manually had to refresh to get new
messages from, though! But this sounds WAY more like the wild wild
west the rest of the Internet was... absolutely fascinating! Thank
you so much for sharing.

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julian-h
julian-h
Julian H@julian-h12/3/2022, 6:14 AM

If anyone wants to replicate this, I have some good news.

If you don't know, matrix is an open source chat app that's very
similar to discord in functionality, but it's federated like
mastodon. So anyone can make a client, and implement it however they
want, as long as they follow the standard. And anyone with a matrix
account anywhere can log onto any matrix client.

A friend of mine made their own matrix client: https://horrible.site/
matrix/login.html

Log into this, and you can chat with anyone on matrix. But it will
insert all text directly into the page as html, allowing similar
shenanigans to geocities chat. It's all sandboxed in an iframe, and
JavaScript is off so it's complete safe.

This isn't exactly like geocities chat, but I hope it gives some
people a similar feeling.

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mcc
mcc
andi@mcc12/4/2022, 8:53 PM

That's amazing. Unfortunate it takes l/p directly and you can't use
something like an OAuth token to sign in. Do you know if this happens
to be open source? Maybe I could write a OAuth PR, lol

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garudina
garudina
@garudina2/13/2023, 3:05 PM

I have seen another chat that was technically similar - attached to
furry pornographer Mama Bliss's website, of all things - but nobody
there ever did anything with HTML. We were there to horn on one
another, not to hack a website.

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