A Pioneer of the Early Internet
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*Links for Lycos are unavailable on this page to protect the safety and privacy of Parlor guests.
Tripod Lycos--The Original Parlor's Home
On this blog is a section called The Archive. I still have a video I made as a page-by-page slideshow of Come Into My Parlor at the time I first launched it in. They also all used different templates Tripod provided to the point where my brother, who is no tech slouch himself and who contributed significantly to my redesigning my website, howls with laughter to this day.
Each page of the original Parlor is archived on Wayback Machine. At the times stated, I personally archived each and every page of the Parlor that was published at that time as snapshots on Wayback Machine. I believe that is important for you to know--I did not just supervise, request or use anything that would have automated the process (if one even exists). I archived each and every page myself, from my own device.
Despite its archival appearance, be aware that I am still the owner of the site and of all intellectual property on it that belongs to me. The rights of other intellectual property owners, including but not limited to AMC and Anne Rice herself, also remain intact.
Regardless of the infernal ad banners, my website is not and never has been monetized by me. Not on Tripod Lycos, not on Google Sites, not on YouTube, not on Facebook, not here, not anywhere. Anyone who tries to monetize the content or otherwise use it fraudulently not only faces the prospect of civil penalties but also potential criminal charges.
For a period of years, I did have the comeintomyparlor domain, which just means I PAID Tripod Lycos to NOT put those fugly ads all over my Parlor. It also meant I got to have more bells and whistles like those cursors with the trailing tails on them, and a lot more room for STUFF I didn't sell and no one bought from me. Did you know they even had a music player at one time? That was fun.
Still...
For those affected, I did discover that the Help Desk sites for Lycos and Tripod Lycos are still active.
Everything else is now gone.
Update July 2026: As of the last few weeks or so, the help desks for Tripod Lycos and Lycos are now gone as well.
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| The Parlor in 2008, Knives Out-inspired coffee cup on the desk--all in 3D |
Bad Gateways Everywhere
From June 2008 to July/August 2025, Come Into My Parlor/The Mayfair Witches Parlor was hosted by Tripod Lycos. Over time, the web host fell behind competitors and for several years, retained its features and its user interface that it had had since the 2000's. Even I had trouble tracing its corporate structure and journey near the end.
There was a great deal of service interruptions that resulted in an unholy amount of 502 errors that kept site owners from even being able to log in. On top of that, security certificates were expiring left and right, renewed for a tiny bit of time and then expired again. These interruptions seemed to primarily impact Tripod and its sister host, Angelfire.
Now, many platforms do indeed have advertising in one form or another to cover costs for services they offered for free, and Tripod Lycos was no different. Basically, the host runs ads on your free site and the host collects ad revenue for those ads. Unfortunately, they never got past the banners and pop-up ads that scare the bejayzus out of people (with good reason) and were at best an affront to my aesthetic sensibilities. What role this might or might not have played in ultimately bringing an end to Tripod and Angelfire, I do not know.
I include it here because this distinction is a critical detail when it comes to monetization, revenue, who got paid what and for what purpose.
Unfortunately, the situation became dire enough (I assume) that on March 6, 2026, Lycos placed a notice on their landing page that advised users of Tripod and Angelfire that both services would be shut down within 30 days. Angelfire has more or less been down since January, but for Tripod, it was on or about Easter Sunday, April 5, 2026, that the 30 days were up.
According to Archiveteam and my own checks, on or about April 24, 2026, Tripod Lycos went down for good.
And do you know what movie just HAPPENED to be on TV in the days following that? Titanic. Oh, for...
A Pioneer Goes Down
Regardless of the difficulties, I will always be grateful to this pioneer of the early Internet for offering to me the same thing many other website owners through the years gained. That is, a chance to learn new skills while sharing another of my passions that had a profound effect on my life: the Mayfair Witches novels.
It is with gratitude for hosting my website for so many years and for their positive contributions as a pioneer of the early Internet that the Parlor pays tribute to and nothing else.
I have decided to share these things, snark and all, because what apparently happened is very relevant to the Internet as it is today. There are many things to learn from this, and one way of helping create a greater understanding of details is by being willing to provide one's own experiences.
I do hope, however, that at least some of this will be useful to others in the right ways. This is one of those things where I update as I learn new information and correct information if I got it wrong. Bottom line: I am just...flabbergasted by what's happened, and how much of it I was unaware of until now.
What happened to Tripod Lycos?
After approximately 30 years online as a pioneer of the early Internet, Tripod Lycos finally went down for the last time on or about April 24, 2026.
Many of the things we have online today that we tend to take for granted--and others we still devise complex hexes against, like the popup eyesore intrusive ads--can find origins in Tripod and Lycos. Blogs, social media profiles, expressing ourselves online in ways that this thing called "social media influencers" can also trace back to, among other things, this little "startup".
Who Owned Tripod Lycos?
Tracing corporate history has never been my thang, although tracing my own family history is a thang of mine older than just about any other interest I have ever expressed even remotely publicly (by that, I mean online). Family history is easier, believe it or not.
Trying to find these little companies like Tripod and Angelfire and Lycos and how they eventually became what seems to me to have spent the last decade or so as a trifecta of name-only services just does not come easily to me. Ever tried to trace the corporate pedigree of a company that's had so much change? A gal can trace lines of her own lineage across centuries totaling just over a millenia (I s***teth thee not--"we Americans' did not just hatch out of eggs one day in 1620, class), oceans, continents, and states full of "counties" and "parishes" and experience one Genie of the Lamp dropjaw moment after another. ALL of which is worthy of mailing spit with all of this already recorded in a test tube.
Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest with family whose shared history with the timber industry goes back well over a century and can even be traced to the early textile industry in America and its roots from across the pond, I can follow that industrial history almost on its own. I can even follow to a somewhat decent extent where and how timber and textile as industries became corporate as we know corporations today.
I can even recount an old family tale that involves timber, a river, a boom--and a production company. Though the story is from 1925, I can even tell you what name that production company is known by today. Perhaps I'll tell that story in a blog post. Everyone likes an Old Hollywood story, even if it is most decidedly NOT a happy one. Especially when it involves a production company that still exists today, but under another name.
You'll know it.
And I can STILL grasp all of that, even follow it to a degree, a lot easier than I can a corporate history that seems to have forgotten its own name over time.
I've begun to suspect that I'm not the only one in this particular pickle, though.
I have also discovered an astonishingly great deal of this in the last few months or so. Maybe that accounts for some of the many WTF moments I've experienced.
Tracing the corporate map of Tripod Lycos has been a series of WTF moments all on its own. I had a terrible time trying to find the name of whatever the parent company called itself now. I'd seen it once, my CRS kicked in, and I didn't find it again until I found a Reddit post about this.
The India-based Brightcom Group.
And it seems this came about around 2017--just in time for the Help Desks of Lycos and Tripod Lycos to never update their articles or system status again.
So What Could Have Happened?
I am well aware that Lycos and ever'body has a Privacy Policy. I am well aware of its 2018 PR advising the world of its readiness for GDPR. But I am also aware that never once did I see a cookie banner of any kind from 2018 to the very end that was not mine.
Never once did I see who actually owned the apparently non-firing and gradually obsolete Universal Analytics tag on EVERY. SINGLE. SITE. hosted by Tripod Lycos.
Never once did I see any actual code for what turned out be a loooooooooooong list of vendors apparently used by this host actually on my site specifically. Vendors I did not use. Many of whom I had never even heard of.
There was far more to this, I believe, than I suspected at the time. To understand why, let me first give an overview of why you see that cookie banner and the links you see under Blog Beezwax. Let me explain...
How Esmeralde Hexes--I Mean Handles--Your Data
Folks, that cookie banner you see on this blog when you first show up is indeed a GDPR compliant cookie banner. I have analytics tags. No, no ads. But still.
This site has a basic cookie consent banner and more strict controls on what data goes where.
If you collect data from users that is sent somewhere else, the users must give their informed, explicit consent first. You can't just say that by using a site, a user's consent is implied. You can't just tell them if they don''t like it, they'll need to opt out. That's not how this works.
That banner with the lovely color coordinated buttons allows you to access the list of vendors I use on my blog. The list is short. It obviously includes Blogger, which is a Google product. Yer Hostess (that would be me) also use Google and Microsoft for analytics, though. These are the vendors for whom you are providing consent. These are the vendors you will find in the Privacy Policy page.
The privacy and cookie policies are not merely there as a legal CYA. Those are the non-smarta** pages of my blogs and websites that tell you who is dropping cookies and why. They tell you how the data is collected and where it goes. Yer Hostess makes sure it goes ONLY where it is supposed to, and this includes every page, every post, every piece of data you give if you leave a comment.
The privacy and cookie policies will also tell you that it is customary to tip the Hostess--wait. That's YouTube. And nope, not monetized there...
Anyway.
GDPR 2018
This is the basics in a nutshell. There is GDPR , and the UK has its own GDPR since Brexit. The main focus tends to be the European Economic Area of the European Union. Just to point this out: Northern Ireland is a separate country from Ireland. Northern Ireland is a part of the UK but Ireland is not. Ireland is a part of the European Union, though.
However, and this is critical: data privacy laws exist across the world. In the United States, and yes, most notably, California. Since California adopted its data privacy laws, many states have adopted their own data privacy laws as well, including Oregon.
If you collect data from visitors to your website or blog, you need a reason. Then, you only collect what you need for the purpose you're collecting it. If you sell products or services, obviously, you absolutely have to protect the data you collect when you collect payment. If you collect other personal data from users for subscriptions or email campaigns, you have to protect any data they give you. If you have a setup where users can create logins to access your site, you have to protect the data. If you have a service that processes certain things for you like payments, that company, that vendor, had better be protecting that data, too.
But you are not in a position to protect the data unless you first obtain the user's explicit, informed consent to collect the data in the first place. That is what cookie banners, privacy policies and cookie policies are for.
This comes from someone who has this process in place. From someone who has also seen some pretty screwy things when it comes to those who might have been operating under the mistaken impression that the old rules were just ducky.
Going back to unrecognized vendors one does not use, here's an example to help illustrate for you when it's time to start asking questions. First, if someone else tries to justify something by saying, "Google says..." when they are not Google, your response should be to confirm if the one saying this is, in fact, Google. If the answer is no (and it usually is no), your answer needs to be, "Okay, then shaddup." And then go directly to Google to see what Google actually says.
If you suddenly find a vendor added to your banner that you do not have any relationship with, business or otherwise, did not add to your site and likely have never heard of, that is a HUGE red flag. That is when you need to ask just who threehornylittlepigs.com is and why they are a vendor in your banner when there is no connection between you and them whatsoever.
If you don't collect user data at all, if you don't even use analytics or anything like that and have no codes for any of these unknown vendors on your website, nor do you use anything to inject code and yet someone is claiming a ton of vendors you need to collect consent for...
Picture the scenario. Class, what does this look like to you?
Because to me, it looks like nothing good.
Web hosts who host free websites, blogs, profiles historically run ads, yes. THEY--the web hosts--run the ads, traditionally to help cover hosting costs. Sites, blogs, profiles--when they monetize, they collect ad revenue. Free websites, blogs, profiles, channels, etc are just that--free. They are not monetized. So why would they remarket data they don't collect to marketers they have no business relationship with whatsoever? Why would they send user data to them at all?
It's not enough to simply SAY a platform is ready for GDPR. They actually need to implement the tools necessary to actually comply. Knowing what it is isn't enough, and neither is trying to pass the buck onto the website owners completely.
Just WTH Is Going On, Here?
That mistake seems to have lowered the value of Lycos--or Brightcom Group? or are they one and the same?--significantly from 2018 on. Lowered the value in such a way that the gap between the true value of the company and whatever revenue they managed to thrash out of the aging Internet giant created more of a smokescreen than anything. The company looked successful and profitable on paper, but the reality was that the value of it was lowered so drastically by the fact that it was outdated and did spent as little money as possible was spent on its own infrastructure. For "revenue", it probably relied on those atrocious banner ads and...eek?
They...might not have had users fill out the necessary digital paperwork GDPR required?
Askin' for a friend.
The true nature of that gap between the value of the company and earnings was, according to investigators in India, accounting fraud. A deception meant to convince investors, shareholders, that the company was more successful and more viable than it actually was. This had all begun to come to light in or about 2023, with some major accountability being served up and handed down in 2025. The entire time, I was revitalizing and maintaining a website that had been there since 2008, all while being unaware of just how bad it was or that anything official was going on.
Because...I had a devil of a time just working out who owned what anymore. Even search engine chatbots couldn't figure it out for a long time. That was, as is usual in cases like this, no accident.
Companies who play musical names like this twisted mess I'm still confuddlepated on do that to cause that very confuddlepated state of mind meant to help keep unlawful, unethical, immoral actions from being found out.
Now, did Ybrant sell the devalued Lycos to Brightcom Group or did they just change their name to Brightcom Group?
A receivership appointing Daum Communications as the receiver (that's done by a court) because the company who was supposed to have bought it from Daum Communications in 2010 but never finished paying the purchase price for it definitely says this was an acquisition at the nicest. But was it Ybrant who was supposed to have bought Lycos from Daum that turned around and was able to then sell it to Brightcom Group, or did Ybrant become Brightcom Group?
There is a Wall Street Journal article about Ybrant filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as a result of the suit against them by Daum. WSJ requires a subscription but I'll provide a link to the article anyway.
New tidbit: Apparently, Ybrant had bought Lycos from Daum in 2010 (I'm trying to recall that far back what I might have come across at the time about this), but... By 2016, they had this...cash flow problem? It resulted in Daum being appointed the receiver for Lycos as Ybrant had not paid for the Lycos acquisition. Then, Ybrant filed for bankruptcy and reemerged almost immediately as Brightcom Group. Or was that "Lycos Internet"?
The sources I read referred to Brightcom Group's Lycos acquisition as "failed".
Wait.
WUT.
Oh. My. God.
At several points in gathering and reading all of this, I actually said out loud, "I don't like this."
As far as I can tell, whatever actually was Tripod or Lycos or Angelfire probably dissolved to the point that only the names still existed in the corporate sense. Their servers and their aging infrastructures were just left to become increasingly unstable to the point of dangerous as security certificates lapsed, 502 Bad Gateway errors disrupted online businesses and attempts to back up legitimate websites, lunatic vermin disregarded the No Phishing signs, and people started receiving extortion emails that might as well have just said "Yoo send me dee creepto yoo sons ah dee beetches."
Somehow, this Brightcom Group managed to hold onto Lycos...kinda...with a series of maneuvers that no doubt make the original founders of Lycos cringe at the very mention of anything connected to this corporate train wreck. If so, I don't blame them one bit.
In fact, from what I managed to find about the aftermath of what was termed a "failed" acquisition of Lycos by Ybrant, the "rebrand" to Brightcom Group came about because the legal and financial disputes involving Lycos led them to decide trying to continue to call themselves "Lycos Internet" would not be a good idea. Yes, that was another one that threw me.
It seems at one point, Ybrant had rechristened themselves as "Lycos Internet" to capitalize on the brand's then-reputation. When Daum Communications took them to court because they still had not paid the whole $36M price set in 2010 and Ybrant filed for bankruptcy (among other things) in 2016, suddenly...the name Lycos wasn't a good look? Oh, for...
This gives me a cramp in my a**.
So, Now What?
You know what?
I just checked for this site on Bing and found that my old Tripod subdomain still comes up. Along with a lot of old links that have never been cleaned out or updated. I've no control over how social media updates their links.
Now, I am just being honest when I say that when it comes to search engines, most seem to move at about the speed of an iceberg when it comes to updating anything. However, one thing I do know from experience is that of all of them, Google has been the one to update their search index on a fairly regular basis. Historically, once your site is indexed on Google, you didn't necessarily have to send them an ungodly amount of recrawl requests before it went, "Oh, did you need something?"
With others, it's not getting a site or a new page indexed that takes about a million years. It's the removal of outdated content and links to sites and pages that went dark AGES ago that seems to be the problem. You can send requests to remove, let them know about the 404 errors that are returned, but...they'll get to it when they get to it...seems to be the policy.
I don't recall if Lycos fell into this category or not, to be honest, as I admit I didn't use Lycos Search very often. I also am looking at things historically speaking and I recall that it wasn't unusual for sites hosted by Tripod Lycos to appear in other search engine results under "Lycos Search". So, if one search engine just pulls from another search engine, that might be another factor. In which case, Lycos would have been pretty good about updating its index on a reasonably regular basis.
Although its search portal is still up (check it if you need to move your Lycos Mail, assuming there is still time), it doesn't seem to work anymore.
Now, on Bing, it caught the part from the old Tripod site's landing page that announced moving day last summer and it shows in the snippet. Thanks...? But be assured: that thang is DOWN. I just checked on at least two different browsers. It's beyond 404 at this point, sweetheart; the server just cannot be found.
Despite all that has happened, and despite my opinion of the corporate goings on in recent years, I still feel a sense of loss when it comes to Tripod, Angelfire and Lycos. Yes, companies come and go. Every company, tech or not, makes blunders. Sometimes they're huge. But for those who were responsible for the Internet both in the beginning and as we know it today, it's unfortunate that they were felled more by having been acquired by a corporation who, by pretty much all accounts, excelled at fraud more than anything. That is an outrage.
I would much rather have seen Lycos, Tripod, and Angelfire all be here today, would much rather have seen what they could have become that would have been positive than to see this happen.
The Site Today
My website, one could argue, is something of a relic of an earlier Internet. What I created on my original website is something that might have launched as a blog rather than a traditional website had I launched it later than I did. It could have launched as a blog at the time. Either environment was and is still an option for a site like this.
Throughout it all, I never monetized it. Fan art is one thing, but I have never written fan fiction and frankly, never cared for it. Why? Ethics. This is a fan site, which is not a mortal sin, by the way. It is also about commentary, about educating and about entertaining. People these days have blogs and social media to do the same thing. Both of those things can trace their tech roots to the early Internet that was shaped by hosts like Tripod and Angelfire, by Lycos.
Facebook groups and pages are another example. I can remember the days of newsgroups and message boards. Those have transitioned, evolved into the kinds of communities such as one sees on Facebook. Of all the social media platforms I ever linked to my site in any real way to first, YouTube would have to be it.
YouTube (and Facebook, for that matter) was only a few years old when I launched my site back in 2008. Even then, I could see just what this video sharing platform might have to offer. I could never imagine just how it would explode in popularity, nor could I imagine the kind of innovation that would evolve on it over the course of the two decades it's been here.
But--it did.
Now, YouTube was and is a video sharing platform and a search engine. Yessir. A search engine. Social media, I'd say, is a fraction of what YouTube is.
Whatever it is you need to learn how to do, whatever news updates you're looking for, whatever documentaries you want to find about topics you're interested in, music videos, videos with music in them, or you binge on truly WTH content creator moments like the nice train wrecks they can be...YouTube, honey. A lot of my hilarious attempts cover specific points in the story of the Mayfair Witches, the occasional comparison between page and screen (hint: if you ever hear the book version of the wicked words actually come out of my mouth, you'll know I'm mad), and several that do show my 3D Brevard-Rice/Mayfair Witches house project at various stages.
Hey. I've turned the candelabra on the dining room table since the remote control F-14 nearly toppled it while divebombing a cellphone in someone's hand, okay? You don't bring a cellphone to the table, especially one that's livestreaming on YouTube during dinner. It's rude.
Yes, I think YouTube has become something above and beyond what anyone might have anticipated when it was new. A lot of that had and has to do with innovation. Evolving, changing, growing... Things I wish the Parlor's original web host had been able to do years ago. Many platforms that exist today began a lot longer ago than the kids today might realize. Many of them have that early Internet to thank for existing today. Even if they changed the Internet, they started with an idea, a way to evolve or expand the technology. I say this in the smallest of nutshells, of course.
Today, I want this Parlor of mine to remain a specialized subcategory of what else I create online. Because it is something by me, from me, that I created to discuss, celebrate and pay tribute to a series of novels that had a profound effect on my life, and to the memory of Anne Rice and her extraordinary literary legacy.
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Angel in the Heavens The sun like fire
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