Volla really needs to hire/assign some staff for their support forum The large pile of unanswered questions there does not inspire confidence in their product.

Maybe it’s better in the German-language forums.

1998 isn’t “originally” when Lycos started in 1994. That 1998 snapshot would be their “portal” era, I’d imagine.

And the page where you submitted your website to Lycos – that’s no different than what Google used to have. It just submitted your website to the spider. There’s no indication in that snapshot that suggests that it would get your site added to a curated web-directory.

Those late 90’s web-portal sites were a pale imitation of the web indices that Yahoo, and later DMoz/ODP were at their peak. I imagine that the Lycos portal, for example, was only managed/edited by a small handful of Lycos employees, and they were moving as fast as they could in the direction of charging websites for being listed in their portal/directory. The portal fad may have died out before they got many companies to pony up for listings.

I think in the Lycos and AltaVista cases, they were both search engines originally (mid 90s) and than jumped on the “portal” bandwagon in the late 90s with half-assed efforts that don’t deserve to be held up as examples of something we might want to recreate.

Yahoo and DMoz/ODP are the only two instances I am aware of that had a significant (like, numbered in the thousands) number of websites listed, and a good level of depth.

Lycos, Excite, AltaVista, and of course Yahoo all were originally web directories of this sort.

Both Wikipedia and my own memory disagree with you about Lycos and AltaVista. I’m pretty sure they both started as search engines. Maybe they briefly dabbled in being “portals”.

Maybe… however, there’s nothing in the linked article that makes it clear that the custom plans are going away. Actually, in that linked article, it’s not clear about anything going away.

I just pulled up https://www.usmobile.com/plans in a private-browsing window. With no web-cookies to tell US Mobile that I’m an existing customer, the website still advertises a $8.57/month plan under the “Not data hungry?” banner. And the knowledgebase article at https://www.usmobile.com/help/knowledge-base/what-plans-does-us-mobile-offer/ still mentions the custom plans (but maybe the knowledgebase is out of date).

I believe they still have the “Custom Plans” available, but they’ve made them harder to find.

I have a USMobile account with auto-pay disabled, and because auto-pay is disabled, each month, when I renew my plan, I have to select it all over again like I’m a new customer. I just renewed today, and it was a little harder to find – I had to click on something like “low data user plans” before I could find the option to configure a voice-only account for another month. But I was able to get another month of my $8/mo voice-only service.

It’s possible that I’m grandfathered in, but I suspect the renew interface that I have to use is the exact same interface as the configure-a-new-account interface, and I suspect that the custom accounts are still available to anyone.