Before Pinterest, Google Plus, Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Qapacity, Quechup, Wakoopa (can you believe these made up words? Also yes, I found a weird list on the internet of social networking websites) there was STLPunk.com, founded and operated by local artist / punk Jerome Gaynor. And before STLPunk.com ever resembled anything close to those sites, it was a hub for St. Louis punk bands to anonymously shit-talk each other. In these early days (1998?) one would merely sign their band up and then have a little white page with a message board requiring no login. It was simple and goofy and fun, and an incredible resource for finding out about local punk bands and shows. It wasn't until the introduction of personal profiles (early 2000-ish?) that things got out of hand, and by out of hand I mean the site was the most hilarious destination on the internet.
At its peak (2005) STLPunk had over 80,000 registered users, and on any given day you could check the "Punx Online" column on the front page and note that you were currently in the company of some 500 or so of your presently-online co-patriots. Band pages still existed, now in suped-up form with MP3 and image hosting, but truly the personal profiles had taken over. Users were no longer exclusively punks and were no longer exclusively from St. Louis. In the years before online social media's massive rise to power STLPunk was essentially Myspace before Myspace was. In many ways it was superior, even, though the rise of the 'space is what ultimately culminated in the site's downfall.
Recently some saintly nostalgic do-gooders have begun utilizing the Internet Wayback Machine to crawl through cached copies of old STLPunk pages, mining hilarious diamonds from the rough and posting them on their tumblr account at http://fuckyeahstlpunk.tumblr.com. For the uninitiated, the Wayback Machine allows users to view content from websites that are no longer online, by archiving tons and tons of screenshots and cache grabs and presenting them for the user by date. Since STLPunk was so hugely successful, the Wayback Machine has thousands of captures from the site, spanning from October 2000 to July 2011.
Okay, we know why you are here, and so now we're going to try to help you find your old STLPunk profile.
