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Source. The directory is a sweep, not a bookmark list. Every destination on this plate was requested by scripts/check-revival-links.mjs on 24 August 2026, one plain GET each, redirects followed, and the status, final URL, content type, byte count and page title written to reference/5-extinction/revival/link-check-2026-08-24.json. The sweep was rerun from scratch before this plate was written and reproduced exactly. Every byte figure printed beside a row is that row's own size_download, not an estimate. No score is printed on the page. An earlier draft led with how many addresses answered, which made the plate about the checking rather than about the going: a reader who wants to visit smol.pub does not need the methodology first. The checking still decides what appears, it just stopped being a number on the wall.

The two that did not answer 200, and only one of them is dead. webdesignmuseum.org returns 403 to a crawler user agent and 200 with 125,695 bytes to a browser one. That is a Cloudflare bot check, not a dead site, and it is recorded live and marked 403 / 200 on its row. Calling it dead would be the same mistake this project already made with the jcink 429 on The forum & the BBS and the 429-read-as-404 that nearly shipped a fabricated statistic on The GeoCities deletion: an unfriendly answer to a robot is not an answer about the site. links.yesterweb.org is genuinely gone. DNS resolves to 45.89.106.174 and port 443 times out after 21.06 seconds, measured twice. Not NXDOMAIN, not a 404: nothing accepts the connection. It is not printed as a tombstone. The row links its last working capture instead, 20230817122434, 17 August 2023, 759,669 bytes, titled Yesterlinks Directory and marked archived so nobody clicks it expecting a live site. That is the same move this guide already made on The GeoCities deletion: parking a reader at a dead end teaches nothing, and handing them the copy that still opens teaches the same lesson without wasting the click. The address itself is still the subject of the closing note, where it belongs.

The dialect, and what is not copied. The layout is the shape of a real links page, taken from davidvkimball-links-2026-08-24.html, 12,537 bytes and eighty anchors captured 24 August 2026: a header block, a navbar strip, a left sidebar, a wide middle column of section-title bars over lists with lowercase parentheticals, a right sidebar, and a footer that credits the layout's author and counts visitors. That shape is borrowed, and one footnote line under the directory says so. His colors, his graphics and his name on the page are not, because recreating somebody's personal site is the one thing this guide will not do. That site appears once, as an ordinary row in the last group, with no descriptor: half that group is on Neocities too, so calling it an example of one would have described its neighbors just as well. An earlier draft gave it a Start here box at the top of the page; the owner cut it himself, and he was right, because a directory that opens by pointing at one site is a directory with a favorite. The palette is read out of three captured revival stylesheets instead: melonland-hyperbar.css gives the bar #e4e8ed, the link #17487c and its hover #1f60a7; melonland-common.css gives the ground #cde8fb, the rule #a2a2a2, the yellow accent, the Times New Roman body and the rgba(0,0,0,.845) 3px 3px heading shadow used on the title; 32bitcafe-base.css gives the heading navy #18206F, its hover #3B459E and the warm gray #5C5346. Each descriptor in the directory is kept on a short leash so no opinion gets smuggled into a catalog: the parenthetical from that captured links page, the destination's own <title> as it came back in the sweep, or the destination's own words about itself. Two rows use the last: imood, whose title is only imood.com and whose homepage button reads put this on your webpage, and SpaceHey, which takes the same old-something gloss that links page already uses for Bitview and Blips. Where neither says anything useful the row is bare, which is what most rows on a real links page look like. The 88x31 in the sidebar is this guide's own button, already in the repository; the footer digits are the counter glyphs drawn for The hit counter, and the number behind them is this guide's own /api/counter, peeked rather than incremented.

The quotations. All three Yesterweb quotes were grepped back out of yesterweb-farewell-2026-08-24.html, 141,464 bytes, before they were printed, and the live address was confirmed to still return exactly that many bytes. The same file is the source for the Yesterweb beginning in February 2021 as a chat server on Discord, the Discord closing in February 2023, the forum closing on 1 May 2023, the indefinite hiatus, and the Mastodon server having currently no plans. The Folk Revival derivation is the MelonLand wiki quoting itself, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 and attributed. The Neocities line is verbatim from its about page, which lists five principles, counted rather than remembered.

Deliberately absent. Any count of Neocities sites. Neocities used to publish one and no longer does, /stats is a 404, and every figure in circulation is stale or unsourced. Any user count for any destination here. Any date for when the revival started, and any claim that it is growing, because nothing measures that. Any prediction about which of these will answer next year, which is the one thing a directory can never promise and the reason the date is printed beside the count. Any reading of why the Yesterweb closed beyond the reason it published: it is quoted, not interpreted, and nothing on this page says its closing means the revival failed. Also absent is a field marks panel, the only plate in the guide without one. Field marks exist so a reader can recognize an artifact in the wild, and this plate documents no artifact: it is a directory of places that are open right now. What stood there was five observations about links pages in general, which is filler wearing the format, so it went and check-plate-rules.mjs exempts this one file by name. Also absent are the tools. The captured links page carries texture packs, cursor galleries, layout builders and template sites, and several of those already have a plate of their own; this plate is where you can go, not what you can download.

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