The Wolf Web

The Wolf Web (TWW) is a discussion board launched in 2000 for students at North Carolina State University. It was part of the PartyInCollege (PartyInCollege.com), later known as CampusBlender (CampusBlender.com), network, a ring of sites running the CrazyWeb software that was developed and refined on TWW. I know of some history of the ownership of the site and of Party In College / CampusBlender but it's not important to recount here, but sources1 2 are provided if you're curious.

Nobody at NC State right now seems to know about TWW, and it seems this has been the case for a long time. Still the site persists; users with mid 5-digit post counts and accounts over 8,000 days old still post from their nursing homes for whatever reason and haunt the site like ghosts. Registration is currently closed and, even when it was open, required either (1) an @ncsu.edu email address or (2) a $5.00 activation fee. I actively have an account on the site, as I discovered the site while in college in 2017, but sometime between then and now new user registration was disabled. Needless to say I missed the site's prime by over 16 years and have made only a few posts to TWW.

Some sections of the site have wound down but around 2002 the sections on the site were:

Message Board
Photo Gallery
Calendar
Book Exchange
Ride Exchange (Ride Share)
School Tool

The Message Board was the main area for discussion and is structured like any forum with topics and replies. Posts could be formatted with CrazyCode which is very, very similar to BBCode if not a strict subset. Unfortunately the message board was wiped sometime around 2004 except for Feedback Forum, necessarily because the Internet Archive shows there were 14000+ topics on the site's previously largest board, The Lounge, as early as October 2001. Presently there's 103,986 topics under the off-topic board Chit-Chat and 11,867 under The Lounge.

The Photo Gallery was the space for users to upload pictures. This acted both as a general purpose, hot-linkable image host like how forum posters used photobucket and as a place to share images on TWW itself. The Photo Gallery was thankfully not wiped when the Message Board was.

Calendar was a part of the site where clubs and local venues could advertise their special events or meetings. Anyone with an account could put anything on this calendar. Book Exchange was a small marketplace for trading class textbooks to other students. Each seller entry listed the course number, title, price and date posted. Ride Exchange was where students driving a long distance could communicate to carpool together. Especially useful during Winter and Summer breaks when students would leave campus to drive back to family elsewhere in the state. Finally, School Tool aggregated data about NCSU classes like class times, professors, textbooks, grade distributions and reviews. It would also tell you which TWW users were in your classes if they added them under their own School Tool.

At its prime there were supposedly 118 sites in the CampusBlender / PartyInCollege network. TWW, as I understand, was the genesis of this federation because the TWW admins wrote CrazyWeb, the custom application that powered every site in the federation.

On the other PartyInCollege sites I have seen the following sections beyond what TWW had:

Webcams
Party Tunes
Hookup
Groups

The help page under Webcam is pretty interesting:

SETTING UP YOUR WEBCAM

Just about every school gives you personal webspace with FTP access. This is ideal for hosting a webcam.

To use this webspace fluently with your camera you will need to obtain a webcam software program. Many webcams come with free webcam software. I use a program called ConquerCam which costs $10. You Can use this program flawlessly forever without purchasing it, but every few minutes or so it leaves a watermark that says "Evaluation Version" on your picture. To get rid of this you can pay the $10. I've tried numerous programs and continue to go back to ConquerCam. ConquerCam appeals to me and is the most flexible for the way I run my system. Many of the other programs are also good; Download.com has plenty of them.

Once installed and connected to your webcam, you need to setup the FTP system within the program. To do this in ConquerCam: go to View > select "Options" click on uploading. Click the first button which creates "New Upload Connection" then "New FTP site". Host name is the name of your FTP server.

hostname: personal.ecu.edu

Username: EKR1022

Password: *****

(these are usually the same as your school email login)

You can leave the directory blank which is the default root directory File Name: just make it whatever you want your picture to be name (Ex: Evan.jpg)

ADDING YOUR WEBCAM TO PIC Then go to your PIC Site and click webcam > Add Webcam > Add a title and description and the in the URL you put the location of your stored picture (EX: http://personal.ecu.edu/username/filename.jpg ---> http://personal.ecu.edu/ekr1022/test.jpg )

Click "Add Webcam" and you are ready for your very own peep show!

Interesting.

And because non-TWW sites are permadead things like the webcam and hookups pages will remain a mystery as they were gated by login. Some things we were never meant to know. May be for the best.

By far my favorite thing to do on TWW is to click around the user galleries. Among the pornography, memes of George Bush, and endlessly reposted garbage are genuinely interesting candid pictures of people around the campus, in their dorms or at parties. There is OC art and flyers for campus events long passed. Sometimes I recognize spaces from these pictures on campus that have since been bulldozed or changed entirely. It's not necessarily a good or a bad thing, just a thing that happens.

This is a big reason I keep revisiting the site. The gallery is a snapshot of a time far removed from today without any of the survival bias inherent in the things we collectively remember.

It's fun to look back and remember that not much changes.

TWW was the most active of the PartyInCollege / CampusBlender sites but it was among a claimed 111+ other sites. Here is a list of 107 sites I found in the federation:

www.partyapp.com
www.partybuckeyes.com
www.partypennstate.com
www.partyaggies.com
www.haloparty.com
www.auburnparty.com
www.partybadgers.com
www.partybeavers.com
www.partyducks.com
www.partybluedemons.com
www.partybruins.com
www.partybulldogs.com
www.partycowboys.com
www.partyclemson.com
www.partycocks.com
www.partycougars.com
www.partytigers.net
www.partycyclones.com
www.partydawgs.com
www.partygophers.com
www.partygators.com
www.partygeorgetown.com
www.partygt.com
www.partyhawkeyes.com
www.partyhoos.com
www.partyhuskies.com
www.partyjayhawks.com
www.partykstate.com
www.partylobos.com
www.partylonghorns.com
www.partyminers.com
www.partypitt.com
www.partyrams.com
www.partyrebels.com
www.partyredraiders.com
www.partyseminoles.com
www.partysooners.com
www.partyspartans.com
www.volsweb.com
www.partytrojans.com
www.partyutes.com
www.partyzona.com
www.coastalparty.com
www.goldenknightsparty.com
www.ionaparty.com
www.huskiesparty.com
www.partybillikens.com
www.partybulls.com
www.partycommodores.com
www.partygreenwave.com
www.partyhawks.com
www.partyhokies.com
www.partyhoosiers.com
www.partyillini.com
www.partylasalle.com
www.partymizzou.com
www.partynova.com
www.partyolemiss.com
www.partyscarletknights.com
www.partytide.com
www.partywpi.com
www.terrierparty.com
www.redstormparty.com
www.partymeangreen.com
www.partyflyers.net
www.partymaryland.net
www.partyhall.net
www.partylouisville.net
www.partymichigan.net
www.partytulsa.net
www.partyuk.net
www.partywarriors.net
www.partynewyork.net
www.partybuffs.com
www.mountaineersparty.com
www.partydevils.net
www.partycal.com
www.partycincinatti.com
www.partyalaska.net
www.partyboston.net
www.aggiesparty.com
www.partyrazorbacks.com
www.party49ers.com
www.partyidaho.com
www.partywyoming.com
www.partyuncg.com
www.partyzips.com
www.partyheels.com
www.partyeastcarolina.com
www.therockparty.com
www.wfunderground.com
www.partyucc.com
www.oduweb.com
www.jmuspot.com
www.radfordparty.com
www.campbellspot.com
www.partypride.com
www.partycanes.com
www.partywcu.com
www.partysouthern.com
www.partyincollege.com
www.partydub.com
www.sunyweb.com
www.sbuparty.com
www.partyvcu.com
www.partyeastcarolina.com
www.theowlweb.com
www.thewolfweb.com
www.dragonclawz.com