Terms from roughly 1999 to 2012, defined as they were actually used rather than as they are remembered. Several have drifted since; where that has happened it is noted.
Publishing and schedule terms
The vocabulary a cartoonist used to talk about their own output and its cadence.
- Buffer — finished pages held in reserve ahead of the publication date. The strongest single predictor of whether a serial survived; see volunteer economics.
- Filler — anything published in a scheduled slot that is not a story page: a sketch, a note, a photograph of the desk. Universally understood as a warning sign in quantity, and universally forgiven once.
- Guest strip — a page drawn by another cartoonist so the regular creator can take a week off. Inside a collective these were a favour economy of their own, and they are frequently the only surviving record that two strips' creators knew each other.
- Arc — a story unit, usually corresponding to a folder in the URL structure. Renaming or renumbering arcs is one of the most common causes of broken archive links.
- One-shot — a self-contained short piece with no continuing series around it. Collectives accumulated large numbers of these, and they were often a contributor's only work on the site.
- Hiatus — an announced pause. Distinguished, usually in retrospect, from simply stopping.
- Archive dive — a new reader starting at page one and reading forward in a single sitting. The behaviour every serial creator wanted and the one that destroyed monthly bandwidth allowances.
Distribution and traffic terms
The machinery that moved readers between sites before feeds and shares existed.
- Webring — a circular linked list of themed sites with previous, next and random navigation, routed through a central script on a third-party host. See distribution before social media.
- Ringmaster — the person who ran a webring and approved membership.
- Banner exchange — a co-operative advertising network in which members displayed each other's banners, usually at a ratio that left the operator a sellable surplus. The standard banner was 468 by 60 pixels.
- Top list — a leaderboard ranking member sites by reader votes, with an embedded vote button on each member's pages.
- Vote incentive — bonus material shown only after voting on a top list. A very effective growth mechanism and a preservation disaster, since the material lived on the list operator's server.
- Affiliate — a reciprocal link partner, chosen individually rather than through a network, typically displayed as a small button graphic on a dedicated page.
- Hotlinking — embedding an image directly from someone else's server, so their bandwidth pays for your page. Widely resented, occasionally retaliated against by swapping the target image, and a genuine cost on metered hosting.
- Hit counter — a visible tally of page loads, often a third-party image. The era's entire analytics stack for most sites, and a persistent source of self-deception about audience size.
Technical terms
The building materials. Most of these are obsolete; all of them explain something about why the archives are in the state they are.
- Frameset — a container document dividing the browser window into independent panes, each loading its own file. Convenient for navigation, ruinous for bookmarking and linking; the 1999 specification that defined them is still readable, and so are its caveats. See also site anatomy.
- Layer — an absolutely positioned block with fixed pixel coordinates, written by the visual editors of the period. The reason so many archived pages collapse when the window is narrowed.
- Rollover — an image button that swaps to a second graphic on hover, driven by a small script with a preload routine to avoid flicker.
- Splash page — an entry page standing in front of the real site, usually a single image with an "enter" link. Bad for readers, bad for indexing, ubiquitous anyway.
- Collective host — a free comics-specific hosting service that gave each strip a subdomain and shared tooling. Distinct from a collective proper, which was a curated group on one domain.
- Mirror — a second copy of a site or an image directory on different hosting, often donated by a friend to spread bandwidth cost.
- Orphaned image directory — a folder of artwork left on a server after the pages that referenced it were removed or renamed. Common, and often the only surviving copy of a strip.
- Link rot — the steady failure of previously working links as addresses change and hosts disappear. The defining condition of this material, and a standing entry on the Digital Preservation Coalition's register of endangered digital material.
Community terms
Words for the layer that held an audience between updates.
- Board — the message forum attached to a site, running one of a few open-source packages. Thread addresses were query strings, which is why almost every external link to one is dead; see forums and galleries.
- Guestbook — a public comment page with no moderation model. The first component of the era to become unusable and the first to be deleted everywhere.
- Fan art — reader-drawn work featuring a strip's characters, displayed in a dedicated section and credited to the contributor's chosen handle. Fan-art and wallpaper indexes are frequently among the most externally linked pages on a surviving collective domain.
- Handle — a chosen online name, often the only name a contributor was known by. Many contributors of this era were deliberate about not publishing a legal name, which is a preference worth respecting when writing about the period.
- Sketch dump — an informal batch upload of unfinished work to a gallery or board, usually the most instructive material on the whole site and almost never preserved.
Terms that have drifted are worth one final note. Archive in this period meant a strip's own back catalogue, not a preservation copy; publisher was rarely used at all, because collectives were careful to describe themselves as hosts; and independent meant unaffiliated with a print publisher rather than anything about ownership structure. For the model those words were describing, start at the collective model.