To My Readers and Commentors

This page existed on the blog from the middle of 2009 onwards, and it was addressed to exactly the people its title says. Its text was never captured by the archive, so what follows is written now rather than restored — but the reason it was there is not in any doubt.

The blog was the comments

A post here was rarely more than a few hundred words. A photograph and a question. A quiz result and a joke about the quiz result. Seventeen syllables about being annoyed. On its own, none of that would have been worth doing for three years.

What made it worth doing was that a few dozen people came back every single morning and said something. Not a like, not a share — something, with sentences in it, addressed to a specific person. And then they went and did the same on each other’s blogs. On a good day the comment thread under a post about laundry ran to seventy replies and had wandered a very long way from laundry by the end of it.

That is what a blog ring was in 2010, and it is what this page was thanking people for.

What was asked of everyone

The house rules, such as they were, were never written down as rules. They were closer to habits, and everybody kept them:

• If you play a meme, go and read the other people who played it. Don’t just drop your own link and leave.
• If somebody comments on you, comment back. Not as an obligation — because that is the entire mechanism.
• Say something specific. “Nice post” helps nobody and everyone can tell.
• Disagree if you want to. Just do it the way you’d do it to somebody’s face.
• Nobody is being graded. The writing challenge said it outright: use the rules as guidelines to help you, not to confine you.

The monthly comment contest was built on the same idea from the other end. Its qualifying rule — ten comments before you were eligible for anything — existed purely to make sure the thank-you went to somebody who was actually here.

The work behind the welcome

Comment communities of that period looked casual because their machinery was simple. A leaderboard turned familiar names into part of the furniture, while the latest thread showed who had stopped by. Neither device created a community by itself. What mattered was the recognition behind it: readers noticed an absence, remembered an earlier joke and expected that a question on one page might continue on another. The numbers gave that habit a shape without fully explaining the attention underneath it.

Reciprocal visiting supplied most of the motion. Leaving a comment was also an invitation to follow a name home, read what was there and answer in the same spirit. The route was rarely efficient. It wandered through sidebars, link lists and replies, and that wandering was part of its value. A reader did not encounter only the loudest item in a feed; the path was built out of individual acts of curiosity, one small page pointing toward the next.

The same structure made the habit fragile. Every exchange asked for time, and the system had no substitute when several regulars became busy at once. Fewer visits meant fewer replies; fewer replies made the next post feel less urgent; and a missed round could become a new routine. Leaderboards and contests could recognise participation, but they could not manufacture the spare attention on which it depended. The community lasted while enough people kept choosing the slower circuit.

Why the names are not on this page

The original sidebar carried a leaderboard listing more than a hundred commenters by name, with their comment counts beside them, and the various award pages named more people still. None of that has been restored, and it will not be.

Those are real people. They left their names in a comment box on a personal blog fifteen years ago, in a context where the audience was thirty friends, and they had no way of knowing the page would still be readable in 2026. Republishing that list now would be doing something to them that they never agreed to. The thanks are entirely genuine; the list stays off.

The same goes for the comment threads themselves. You will find posts here restored without them, which makes the posts look lonelier than they ever were in life. That is the honest trade.

What the archive can and cannot bring back

It is worth being precise about what has actually survived, because it is much less than it looks.

What survives is the structure: the pages that sat in the menu, the rules of the features, the shape of the week, the categories, the taglines and the sign-off. Those were reachable from every page of the site for three years, so the crawlers caught them repeatedly.

What does not survive is nearly everything that made it worth reading. Roughly a thousand posts were published here; a handful were captured. The photographs are gone entirely, because they were served from an image host that no longer exists. And the comments — the actual substance, the seventy-reply thread under a post about laundry — are gone in every practical sense, and would be left out even where they aren’t.

So what you are reading is the frame of a building rather than the building. That is the normal outcome for a personal site of this period, and it is worth knowing when you look at a restored post here and find it looking oddly quiet. It wasn’t.

If you were one of them

Then you already know which posts you argued under, and this page is for you. Thank you — genuinely, and belatedly, and for a great deal more than the traffic.

The final post ended the way every post here ended, and there is no better way to end this one either.

Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou