Goh Ling Yong : I Am the Last Living Moderator of a Geocities Forum - Goh Ling Yong
The ritual begins at 11:42 PM, after the house has settled into the quiet hum of the air conditioner and the distant rumble of the last bus. I pour a glass of cold water, sit down at my desk, and open a browser tab that has been bookmarked for twenty-four years.
The page loads with a jarring stutter, a relic of an era before graceful degradation. A tiled background of a starfield, grainy and compressed, fights for dominance with a flaming "Welcome!" GIF that has been seizing since 1998. The font is Times New Roman, a stark, serifed black against the cosmic chaos. This is the Neo-Kyoto Anime Bastion, hosted on a long-forgotten Geocities mirror, and I am its sole groundskeeper.
My first task is always the same: clearing the spam. Tonight, it’s a Russian bot selling discount pharmaceuticals, its Cyrillic script a jarring intrusion on a thread from 2001 titled, “Is Shinji Ikari a coward? (SPOILERS!).” I click the checkbox next to the offending post. User: xX_EvangelionLord_Xx. Last login: October 17, 2002. I press ‘Delete.’ The comment vanishes, and for a moment, the forum is pure again. It is a garden no one will ever visit, and I am its silent, obsessive weeder.
The Inheritance
It wasn’t always like this. In 1999, the Bastion was a metropolis. It was a digital haven for a handful of us scattered across Singapore, teenagers hunched over beige tower PCs, bathed in the glow of CRT monitors. The outside world was all school uniforms, sweltering humidity, and parental expectations. But online, we were ronin, hackers, and mecha pilots. We were our handles. Mine was Chrome_Revenant.
The Bastion was founded by a user named CyberSamurai_7. We knew him only as Ken. He was two years older, which in teenage years is a geological epoch. He was the one who taught us how to embed MIDI files, who created the painstakingly detailed ASCII art banners that topped each sub-forum. He was our leader.
We debated the merits of cel-shading versus hand-drawn animation. We shared grainy 240p AVIs of Cowboy Bebop episodes, downloaded over screeching 56k modems in a process that took days. We conducted flame wars of astonishing vitriol over whether Gundam Wing was a betrayal of the Universal Century timeline. It was trivial. It was everything. These conversations, typed out with two fingers on clacky keyboards, felt more real than any I was having face-to-face.
In 2003, Ken was about to enlist for National Service. The internet was already changing. Friendster was the new fascination. The idea of a static, forum-based community was starting to feel archaic. One night, on AIM, his message popped up.
CyberSamurai_7: u still on the bastion a lotChrome_Revenant: ya, every nightCyberSamurai_7: i’m not gonna have time for it anymore. NS.CyberSamurai_7: i’m making u a mod. don’t let it die, ok?
Don’t let it die. It was less a request than a transfer of a sacred duty. A passing of a torch I didn’t know was so heavy. I typed back, “ok,” my heart swelling with a sense of profound, ridiculous importance.
I was nineteen. I had no idea I was signing up for a lifetime appointment.
The Ghost in the Machine
The decline was gradual, then sudden. First, the regulars started logging in once a week instead of once a day. Then once a month. Their last posts became unintentional epitaphs. xX_EvangelionLord_Xx announced he was going to university. SailorSerenity got married. Their digital ghosts linger in their user profiles, frozen in time.
Yahoo! officially shuttered Geocities in 2009. By then, the Bastion was already a ghost town. But a few archivists, bless their digital souls, had created mirrors. Our little corner of the internet, our Neo-Kyoto, was saved from the abyss. But it was no longer a living place. It was a museum. An exhibit with one visitor.
So why do I stay? My wife sometimes asks, gently, what I’m doing so late. “Just work stuff,” I lie, because how do you explain this? How do you explain that you spend an hour every night moderating a conversation that has been silent for fifteen years?
The truth is, I am not just a moderator. I am an archaeologist. Each thread is a dig site. I scroll back through a 1999 discussion about buying bootleg VCDs at the Sim Lim Square market and I’m not just reading text—I can smell the ozone from my old monitor, feel the giddy thrill of illicit media, hear my mother yelling at me to get off the phone line.
I am also a cartographer, mapping a forgotten land. I spend hours hunting down broken image links, using the Wayback Machine to find what a dead img src tag once pointed to. It’s a thrill unlike any other when I find it—a piece of fan art, a goofy GIF—and patch the hole. I am restoring a crack in a fresco that no one else will see. The act of restoration is the point. It is a quiet rebellion against the internet’s relentless present tense, its obsession with the new, the trending, the ephemeral.
This place is a testament to a different kind of digital existence. Before "content creators" and "personal brands," we were just people, hiding behind anonymous handles, sharing a passion. The connections felt un-monetized, purer. We weren’t performing for an audience; we were the audience. Preserving the Bastion feels like preserving that principle.
The Archaeologist and The Native
My niece, Chloe, is fourteen. She lives on TikTok and Instagram, her digital life a constant, flowing river of disappearing stories and 15-second videos. One evening, she came into my study and saw the Bastion on my screen.
“Uncle, what is that?” she asked, her nose wrinkled at the pixelated starfield. “It looks so… broken.”
I tried to explain. “This was like… my Instagram, when I was your age.”
She squinted. “But where are the pictures? The videos?”
“There are some,” I said, pointing to a thread of low-resolution desktop wallpapers. “We had to wait ten minutes for one to load.”
She gave me a look of profound pity, the kind you might give a man who just explained he used to hunt mammoths with a sharp rock. “But who do you talk to on it?”
“Nobody,” I admitted. “The last real post was in 2008.”
“So… you just look at it?”
“I take care of it,” I said.
She didn’t understand. I didn’t expect her to. Her internet is a utility, a glittering, high-speed appliance. Mine was a place. You had to travel to it, with the shriek of a dial-up modem as your spaceship's ignition. You had to build your own little corner of it, brick by painstaking HTML brick. Chloe was born in the gleaming capital city; I am the last resident of a dusty frontier town, stubbornly sweeping my porch.
Her confusion clarified my purpose. I am not doing this for an audience. An audience would ruin it. An audience would want to modernize the UI, to optimize it for mobile, to add reactions and infinite scroll. They would want to turn my quiet, dusty town into another noisy metropolis.
My work is not an act of communication, but of preservation. I am the curator of the 404 error, the conservator of the broken GIF. I fight the slow, inevitable entropy of link rot, the digital equivalent of time and weather. I do it because that promise I made to a boy named Ken twenty years ago became a promise to a younger version of myself. The boy who felt more at home in Neo-Kyoto than he did in his own skin.
The Last Watch
Tonight, after deleting the Russian spam, I perform my other duties. I run a script to check for broken links. It flags three. One is a link to a fan-fiction site that went offline a decade ago. Gone forever. I mark it as such, a tiny digital gravestone. The other two, I manage to find on the Internet Archive. I carefully update the href tags. A small victory.
Then, I do my favorite part. I just read. I browse the old introductions thread. Chrome_Revenant introduces himself as a 16-year-old who loves Akira and is saving up for a new graphics card. He is full of bravado and awkwardness. He is terrified of talking to girls. He has no idea what he’s going to do with his life. He is me. And he is not.
I keep the Bastion alive for him.
I am not deluded. I know this can’t last forever. The mirror site could go down. The server costs could become too much for the anonymous archivist who runs it. One day, I will type in the URL and be met with a definitive, final 404. My ghost town will be gone.
But not yet. Not tonight.
I have finished my rounds. The spam is gone. The links are fixed. The memories are intact, sheltered from the ravages of time for one more day. I close the browser tab. The house is silent. In the digital ether, on a server humming in a rack somewhere in a country I’ve never been to, the Neo-Kyoto Anime Bastion waits in the darkness.
The flaming "Welcome!" GIF seizes on. The starfield glitters. The cursor blinks on a reply box that will never be filled. And I am here. Watching.
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