Before every television fandom had a giant wiki with thousands of editors, sometimes one person simply decided to document the entire damn show.
Browse The Mermalair’s surviving files
The Mermalair was one of the better examples. The SpongeBob SquarePants fan site built detailed episode capsules, character biographies, appearance lists, show information, and miscellaneous reference pages during the show’s early years.
It became substantial enough that later SpongeBob fan-history pages describe it as one of the largest detailed episode-capsule resources in the fandom. When its earlier hosting situation disappeared, SpongeBuddy Mania began preserving the site in 2006.
That preservation matters because the pages capture a very specific form of fan labor.
A fan site as reference book
The Mermalair did not merely say that SpongeBob was good.
Its episode pages recorded production numbers, original air dates, writers, storyboard artists, animation directors, DVD appearances, VHS appearances, short summaries, longer plot descriptions, and observations about individual episodes.
The surviving episode index reports 188 capsules.
Character pages did the same thing for SpongeBob, Patrick, Squidward, and the rest of the cast: physical descriptions, occupations, interests, family relationships, friends, first appearances, voice actors, and long lists of episode appearances.
This kind of site was effectively a volunteer database implemented as ordinary HTML.
No MediaWiki installation was required. No fandom platform owned the structure. No account system was necessary for the author to publish an update. The webmaster just added another page and another link.
The result is less standardized than a modern wiki and more personal. You can see the editorial choices directly: what deserved a capsule, how much detail mattered, which categories were useful, and which parts of the show the maintainer cared enough to document.
That is why old fan sites remain valuable even when modern reference sites contain more information. The modern site tells you about the television program. The old site also tells you how fans used the Web around the television program.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many remnants of that decentralized fan-Web period.
The Mermalair survived because another fan community cared enough to host it.
That is about as old-Web as preservation gets.