Republika.pl

» see republika.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Onet launched Republika WWW in 1999. It gave any Polish internet user a free web page at an address ending in republika.pl, the local answer to GeoCities. The Digital Heritage project records the slogan the portal used for it: "Pierwszy w Polsce portal społeczności internetowych", the first portal of internet communities in Poland. The Wayback Machine first sees the republika.pl address on 12 October 1999.

I went online in 1998 over a dial-up modem in Turkey, and the free page hosts I heard about were the American ones, GeoCities and Tripod. A Polish beginner could get the same thing in Polish, under a .pl address, from the portal that already ran their mail.

The service closed on 30 March 2018. Paweł Jurek, the managing director of the Onet segment, gave Wirtualne Media the epitaph a week earlier: "Można bez przesady powiedzieć, że Republika.pl to legenda polskiego internetu." He added that its best days were more than a dozen years behind it and that the technology was obsolete. About a thousand people a month were still logging in.

~ the record ~

~ nine megabytes and a pop-up ~

The front page captured in November 2002 lays out the deal. A free account came with 9 MB of disk space and 1 GB of transfer a month. For 49 złoty a year you got 30 MB and five times the transfer. The paid plan also promised, in the site's own words, "Brak reklamowego pop-up'a", which tells you what the free pages opened with. The banner invited visitors to join the largest internet community in Poland. In 2003 Onet reported more than 300,000 accounts, and described them as mostly hobby pages, with small firms and schools among the rest.

Republika also tried to teach. A section called Fabryka held courses in HTML and JavaScript, along with a beginners' corner under the name LamerZona. Members' pages were sorted into a themed catalog, and a shelf called Panteon displayed the current prize-winning site.

~ FTP only ~

From August 2013 Onet ran its hosting offer in partnership with nazwa.pl. The free plan of 2017 was called Republika START and offered 50 MB. In the middle of that year a notice went up: from 1 July 2017 nobody could log in to the site or use its WebAdmin tool, and pages could be updated only with what the notice called a classic FTP program.

The next notice, in February 2018, was a banner reading "1 marca 2018 r. serwis Republika WWW zostanie zamknięty." The text under it told owners to download their pages and warned that every address in the service would be deleted on the closing day. It also asked them to fill in a survey. Wirtualne Media reported on 22 March that the deadline had been moved to 30 March because users had asked for more time. The banner was never redrawn and still said 1 March in the capture of 26 March. The Digital Heritage project gives 1 March as the closing date, which is the banner's date. The archived front page kept answering until 2 April, and from 4 April it forwarded elsewhere.

~ the anchor in the redirect ~

Type republika.pl today and you land on Onet's home page, with a campaign tag in the address that says republika_info and an anchor that says zamkniecie-republika, the closing of Republika. Digital Heritage points out that the losses of that period went beyond files, since the themed catalogs were often the only lists of the small Polish sites they indexed. Miasto WWW closed on 21 May 2018 and Wirtualna Polska's catalog on 31 January 2019. Onet is still clearing out: its question and answer site Zapytaj goes read-only on 21 September 2026 and shuts on the 30th.

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