THE RETREAT
The Archer’s Retreat, a community of archery sites
How The Archer’s Retreat worked: independent archery web sites joined by a member list and a random, next and previous browsing system.
- 3,040venues
- 87countries
Archived copies kept by the Internet Archive between 1999 and 2002 show that archery-info.com once ran the Archery Information Service, home of “The Archer’s Retreat”: a virtual community of independent archery web sites, with a member list and links to browse from one site to the next.
How a virtual community worked before social networks
In the late nineties an archer who wanted to share a hunting diary, a bow-tuning guide or a local tournament calendar built a small home page. The Retreat gathered these pages under one roof. Each member was listed with the name of its owner and a few keywords such as archery, bowhunting, 3-D, bow tuning or traditional bows, and each page carried links to move to a random member, to the next one or to the previous one.
The same three gestures, today
The browsing gestures are still useful when you do not know exactly what you are looking for. They now apply to venues instead of personal pages:
- Random shows a venue drawn from the whole directory, a good way to discover a range in a country you had not thought about.
- Next and Previous walk through the directory one venue at a time.
- List is the member list, rebuilt as a list of countries with the number of venues mapped in each.
Disciplines you will meet
Archery is not only hunting. On any weekend there are target, field, 3-D and clout events, and the directory documents which disciplines a venue is known to offer. Open the disciplines page to filter the map by the way you like to shoot.