Requiem for a Web Page

Scott Hardie | August 12, 2001
Until today, I featured something called "Who Would You Kill?" on my home page. If you've known me long enough, you've probably killed somebody on it. This entry is meant only to say something brief and positive about what I had hoped would be a good thing.

I took the idea from the page from whowouldyoukill.com. They did it much better than me, but I wanted my own version, and it didn't seem hard. The idea was that a new television show was featured at regular intervals, and visitors to the site could choose which character they wanted to kill. The other guys did theirs with CGI and updated results instantly; I had to use email forms and update my results manually.

The first reason why the page came down was that I just don't care about it. I liked the idea at the start, and I still do, but there's no humor in it, and it doesn't really go anywhere. The last one that I ever put up, Who Would You Kill on The Kids in the Hall?, was #50. I had always planned to redesign the site after 50 shows, and I went so far as to have the new look ready. It was okay. But the game was the same, and I had little interest in continuing to punch new character names into the same old fields, especially when I had never seen the shows in most cases.

The second reason was that the page became too popular. It's really a catch-22: I can handle it when it's just a few of my friends, but there are very few kills and the polls are meaningless. If more people play and the polls become valid, I get more form entries than I can handle. And that's what happened. I was getting 1-3 form entries a day, and I just couldn't deal with them. I'd stuff them all into a little folder in Outlook Express and open that maybe once or twice a month and process all of the entries then. This went contrary to the spirit of the page, but I didn't have time to keep updating it constantly.

The third reason was fucking animé. To date, the most popular show has been Sailor Moon, which was maybe the fifth show ever. Lori requested it and then advertised it on a newsgroup when I put it up. The result was an influx of kills for that show. Fine; I'm glad to have the traffic. The problem was that players can request new shows, and lots of them requested more animé shows. Then when other visitors came to see those animé shows, they'd request other animé shows, and so on. I was getting requests for Japanese titles that I could not find in any search engine. What the fuck? If I wanted an animé web page, I would have made one. (This, btw, was yet another nail in the coffin of my interest in animé.)

The fourth reason was the general stupidity of the respondents. Some were capable of filling out the forms just fine, but at least one out of every three form entries showed some kind of idiotic mistake. They'd request a new show without giving their real name, something that I prohibit as announced on every WWYK page. Or they'd request a show that I'd done already, which they could have seen if they'd click on any of my links to go back to the main WWYK page. Or they'd request the same show on which they were already killing a character. Or they'd request a show that didn't exist, like "Digimon vs. Dragonball Z." Not all of the problems came from requesting shows, but that was by far the most common source. 90% of the people who visited one of the pages were completely unaware that I was killing characters on other shows, too. I'd also get people asking on the form, "How can you kill a character on x show? It's a fictional character!" Such a statement is idiotic on so many levels that I'll not bother responding to it.

There were a whole bunch more reasons, but the above basically cover it. My friends all stopped caring long ago, and while I held out this long (one year, eight months), I finally gave out as well. People will probably continue to find my pages in search engines for a while, but since I never submitted any of the pages to search engines in the first place, I'm not going to try to delete the listings. Never again will I have to deal with another idiot who wants to kill Tai on Digimon: Digital Monsters and then, without telling me his name (which I can fucking see on the email message anyway), request a new show called Digimon: Digital Monsters. Aaaaaaaaah.

Lori Lancaster | August 13, 2001
[hidden by request]

Scott Hardie | August 13, 2001
No, truthfully, I'm glad that you advertised that page when you did. It was the long-term consequences that I didn't like.

I remember the idiots in the newsgroup at the time. After you posted it, 1-2 people actually wrote back to your message saying who they would kill. Again, idiots.