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Source. The outer half is tag-board.com as captured 20040802065536, which holds the embed verbatim: a 250 x 200 iframe named tag, a form whose target points at it, maxlength="20" on the name, cols="24" rows="3" on the message, and a submit button labeled TAG. The inner half was not in that capture and had to be pulled: my.tag?name=tag-board at 20041014011216, its mod.js, and the stylesheet that board loaded from deadly-sins.net/tagboard/tbcss.css, all now in reference/3-conversation/tagboard/wayback-2004/. Everything about how a row is built comes from there and nothing from memory: the handle wrapped in .: and :., the timestamp living only in a title attribute, the tablebg0 and tablebg1 alternation, the twenty-row cap and the More --> link to archive.tag?name=tag-board&start=20&num=20. Verdana at 11px and the #D3DEE4 and #95B7CB rows are that board's own file; the page around it is cbox.ws as captured 20050701234548, which supplies #eeeeee, #bcccda, #3F5F77, the #C85B05 the service used for its own voice, and the #8EAEC4 input border.

What ships, and why the mechanism is real. Auto-refresh was the Enhanced tier at $20 a year, and mod.js shows what the money bought: gc() requests a URL under enhanced/ through an Image() every twenty seconds so the server can hand back a cookie, and cc() reads that cookie every 1,515 milliseconds and replaces the frame when the number stops matching. A cookie as the transport and a poll on the client, with no XMLHttpRequest in it. Upgrading on this page starts a beacon counter and a poll at that same interval and prints the revision number as it moves, rather than describing any of it. The board itself is ordinary DOM: the target-into-iframe trick is shown as the reveal and not used as the implementation, because a visitor cannot tell and it costs an hour. Everything typed is escaped, then exactly the three tags the 2004 feature list named, Bold, Italics, Underline abilities, are allowed back, along with the URL and email autolinking it also listed. The smilies are drawn here at the real 15 by 15 rather than rehosted; the color defaults to the blue in /smilies/141/shocked.gif, which is 181 bytes with #00ff00 burned in as the transparent key, and the picker stands in for over 250 different colors.

Two things the capture does not say, said plainly instead of filled in. The URL field ships disabled on tag-board.com's own demonstration board. That is the fact; the capture never gives a reason, so none is offered here. And the '9' in startTimer('tag-board','9') is not a nine second delay: mod.js uses it as the board's revision number at render time, the value the cookie is compared against. The one inner frame that survives is the Enhanced demo, so what a free board looked like sitting still is an inference from the feature list rather than a capture, and the plate says so on its face. The stylesheet quoted for the missing # is one board owner's file; the defect is what it says, and no claim is made about what any particular browser then did with it.

The conversation in the board is written. The archived frame is twenty real messages from real people talking in October 2004, and none of their handles or lines are reproduced. The row markup is shown with the handle and the text replaced, and mothbox, tinselrat and 9volt are invented. There is no server, nothing persists, and nothing anyone types here leaves the page.

Deliberately absent. How many tagboards ever existed, when the format peaked, why tag-board.com stopped serving, and whether spam or platforms killed it: none of that is in these captures. The eighteen smilies and their numbered color folders, beyond the one attested at 141. The hit counter that sat under the form in the 2004 markup, because no number from it survives. The moderation tools, which are a line of upgrade copy and not an interaction. A cbox skin as a second theme, since cbox supplies the palette and does not need its own mode. And sound, which no plate in this guide makes.

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