Madchat.org

» see madchat.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Madchat had no design. It was an Apache directory index, white monospace on black, with a Lewis Carroll line sitting above the file list. "But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarks, and the Cheshire Cat answers that she cannot help it, because everyone here is mad. Chat is French for cat. That is the whole joke and the whole visual identity, and for nine years it was enough.

Under the quote were folders. coding, for source and protocol documents. crypto, for analysis and wordlists. reseau, for network security. sysadm, for Unix administration. vxdevl, for virus writing. esprit, described in the listing as le maitre des ames. Later there was bricolo, which was lockpicking and urban exploration, because by then the definition of the thing had widened past computers. And e-zines, which was the reason most people came.

Starting in 1997, the project set out to gather up as much of the French-speaking underground's written output as could be found and put it in order. The result was strange in a way a curated site never is. The Noway e-zine sat near Timothy Leary's musical experiments and bootleg recordings of Saez concerts, with screen captures from Serial Experiments Lain a folder over. Alongside all of that were the technical texts, which is what the archive was actually for: exploitation writeups, telephony, web protocols, computer virology.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cryptel affair ~

Early in 2001 two minors in Versailles were arrested for telecommunications fraud after breaking into a PABX. Asked how they had learned to do it, they said they had followed instructions in an underground electronic magazine called Cryptel, which they had downloaded from madchat.org.

The police went looking for whoever ran the site and started with Damien Bancal, whose name was on the whois record even though he was only the administrative contact and other people did the actual running. They eventually reached the real administrator, a man the French sources name only as Leonard, who was living in the United States at the time. He was woken in the middle of the night by a phone call about a French police investigation, and he shut the entire archive down that night. It stayed down for six to eight months and reopened the following summer.

~ the last capture ~

The archive's last live capture is 8 November 2006, and the folder timestamps in it go up to 2 November, so it was still being maintained days before the end. By 1 December the domain was answering with 401 bytes of plain HTML from the hosting company, Digital Network, saying in French that the site or sites you are trying to reach are currently under maintenance or no longer exist. No farewell and no last post from anyone who had run it. A hosting boilerplate page, and then nothing.

Unlike 2001 this one held. French Wikipedia records the closure as definitive from the end of 2006, and notes that complete archives of the site were circulating on file-sharing networks by then, which is the correct ending for a site whose entire purpose was making copies of things.

~ the long afterlife ~

The content did not go away, it just stopped being maintained. A mirror came back up under the same domain with file dates from May 2007, and a second one lived at madchat.fr with directory timestamps that stop around May 2012. Both then sat there, frozen, answering requests for over a decade. madchat.fr was still serving that Cheshire Cat index in early 2025. The .org kept answering into late 2025. Today neither one resolves, and the archive exists only in whatever copies people took.

I was not in the francophone part of this. I came online in 1998 in Turkey, on a modem, and I read English-language text files, because English was what a Turkish teenager with a dictionary could get through. But the shape of Madchat is instantly familiar to anyone who was there. No front page worth the name and no search box, just a directory tree somebody maintained by hand, full of .txt files with headers drawn in ASCII. That was the standard format for knowledge on the early web, and there is not one working example of it left that I can point somebody at.

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