Back in the olden days, before instagram, twitter and facebook was a thing I wanted a way to share photos from lanparties I and others attended.
The start
The first couple of versions was based on Menalto Gallery (now known as Gallery the Revival). It was a PHP based content management system for images. It supported multiple users, groups and a lot of things that was perfect for our new site.
Thanks to the already established sister-site lana.nu and it’s calendar of lanparties across the country it quickly grew with new images added almost every weekend.
The popular years
After a couple of years the number of images exeeded 60000 and during our most popular weekend we could have more than 100000 visitors.
The popularity during DreamHack events was so large that to avoid causing problems for our hosting provider we accually moved the server physically during a couple of events to Elmia and DreamHack itself. The event had more tha enough bandwidth and our site didn’t even cause a bump on the network graph. During the peak events we even got sponsored with a couple of NetSC
The decline
During the mid 00 it seemed like there was several lanparties every weekend all year around. But after a couple of years it declined, even the big events like DreamHack saw the BOYD-numbers decline. That, combined with a lack of time and interest the site was “archived” as a static version, to keep it up without having to upgrade the gallery version everytime a new vulnerability was found.
Today
The site is still up, over 10 years later, and you can visit at https://www.lanbilder.se/