The most useful old websites are often the ones built because somebody got tired of answering the same question twice.
Ed Collins has been using chess database software in the Scid family since the late 1990s. He says that back then he built a website to help other users understand it, eventually calling the project A Tribute to Scid vs. PC.
The remarkable part is not that he made a help site in 1998.
It is that, nearly three decades later, he was still pointing people toward it.
In a 2025 Chess.com discussion, Collins said he still used Scid vs. PC and linked users back to the old material he had created for newcomers.
That is personal-Web durability in its purest form.
Documentation that outlived several generations of software culture
Chess software has never been short on complexity. Databases, engines, opening trees, game collections, analysis tools, importing, exporting, and search functions can turn a simple board game into a small computing discipline.
A good volunteer help page therefore becomes more useful than its author probably expected.
Collins’s site fits the pattern of the classic specialist homepage: one person learns a tool well enough to explain it, writes down the process, adds examples, and leaves the material available at a stable address.
There is no requirement that it become a company.
There is no need to convert the instructions into a video channel, Discord server, subscription course, or SEO-driven support center.
The page itself is the product of expertise.
That model matters because old software communities are full of missing knowledge. Programs survive while forum threads disappear. Download mirrors remain while installation notes vanish. A tool may still run perfectly, but the one person who knew why a particular setting mattered took down his homepage fifteen years ago.
Collins did the opposite.
He kept the homepage.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list repeatedly turns up these little islands of durable documentation. They are easy to underestimate because they do not look like archives.
They look like somebody’s hobby page.
Sometimes that is exactly why they survived.