scripthacker:

scripthacker:

Thanks for the ask! (loving the Willow icon, btw) 😀

Everybody love the dark web, let us go diving once again.

The internet is massive. Mahoosive. Search engines can work very quickly to index things, but with the sheer scale of the internet, trying to index everything quickly becomes ridiculously unfeasible. ‘Deep web’ is a term used to describe the parts of the internet what is not indexed (about 96%, and if you think about how much content you can find on google the amount of information in the deep web is just bonkers). That’s all it is, unindexed, meaning you can’t find it using google, or yahoo, or bing. This includes both things that just haven’t been looked at, and things behind paywalls and login pages. Anything that you have to log in or pay to access, that is technically part of the deep web. Bank account information, emails, private tumblr blogs, etcetera. All deep web.

‘Dark web’ is a subsection of the deep web, that’s where all the scary stuff is. The stuff that goes from ‘not sure it’s legal’ to ‘I am now on seventeen different watchlists for even thinking of this.’ That said, it functions the same as the internet, a client browser asks a server computer for information, the server provides what it knows.

A forum that your user posts all their illegal shenangins kitten videos to could look like any webpage that’s belongs on the ‘surface web,’ or it could look like an edgelord’s personal diary. What it looks like is really up to the people who coded it. Granted, sometimes dark web ‘forums’ look nothing like a surface web forum, sometimes they are command line only types of things, so it could look like this:

Obviously, all us hackers still use CRT monitors, have a typing speed of 394 words per minute, and smell faintly of bacon. That goes without saying. >.>

Back to the actual meat of your question, what would it look like if the forum became inaccessible after it was shut down? Depends on the admins. Good admins would leave an explanation, great admins may even leave the site as an archive if they can get away with it. Naturally this may not be a fantastic idea in some cases, all those kitten videos could get someone in real trouble, cuteness overload. Bad admins, those who don’t care, or admins who just drop off the face of the planet (arrested, died of a heart attack from cuteness overload, forgot the password) may leave behind nothing, resulting in a lovely 404 error message, or a browser error message.

If the site is taken down and rendered inaccessible but the server is still up, any computer making a request for that site will receive a 404 error message. The 404 is a standard HTTP response code, if the browser finds nothing to display at the address your character requested, it will give them that. If everything is completely gone, then your character may see a browser error message, or something from their internet service provider that looks like this:

What will your character see? Whatever you want the poor bugger upstanding citizen to see, you’re the author. If the site simply doesn’t exist, a 404 or a browser error is what I’d put my money on.

Go forth and write, my good author! 🙂

Disclaimer

~Lotus

Edited (03/13/2017) in response to goatsgomoo‘s message which is absolutely correct. A 404 would be thrown by a still active server that no longer has the page, if the server is gone a browser error of some nature may be shown. Whoops!

Thanks for the correction 🙂