FAQ
Who runs this website?
Howdy! I'm bonkmaykr. I go by a lot of different names elsewhere but that's the name I typically stick with. I'm a retro tech enthusiast half the time and a diehard gamer the rest. You can contact me by email or by the Kangworlds guestbook, I read everything.
Where may I contact you?
My contact information is in the footer of bonkmaykr.xyz. I will be keeping it up to date, even if that site stays pretty dormant otherwise, so always look for my details there. I do not use Carrd or LinkTree.
What is Worlds? Where did it come from?
Worlds, or Worlds.com, is a 3D online chatroom comparable to VRChat. The company Knowledge Adventure Worlds got it's start as a subsidiary of Knowledge Adventure or Jump Start Games, who were best known for Neopets and several edutainment games for the PC. In collaboration with Steven Spielberg, they would create a program called Starbright Worlds, which was intended to bring terminally sick children together in an exclusive online space for them. The program would eventually evolve into a commercial product called Worlds Chat and be released to everyone.
In 1995, there was an "End of the Worlds" party, an online event where the Worlds Center space station crashed into a red planet. When the station crashed, all users were booted offline to perform an update and Worlds Chat was upgraded to Worlds Chat Gold, thereby leaving early access. Knowledge Adventure Worlds, now known as Worlds Inc., would create sponsorships with major brands such as AOL and Coca-Cola, and also had a partnership with music artists such as David Bowie and Britney Spears. Worlds was bundled in with CDs provided to AOL subscribers. In 1998, Worlds Chat was once again overhauled into the "WorldsPlayer" we know today, which is based off of the Renderware 2 game engine and allowed for phong-shaded 3D models. Users created many custom worlds with WorldsPlayer (codenamed "Gamma" by developers), and hosted the World files on their web servers for others to load up and join. Unfortunately, many of these old worlds are lost to time forever, as is most of the old internet.
Worlds would stop getting major updates sometime around the mid-2000s, aside from some recent QoL improvements thanks to the late LRNR. For a long time, it only stayed online in order to provide the Worlds Inc. CEO with leverage in order to perform patent trolls and milk money from trademarks. Worlds is still very primitive by today's standards, but thanks to some explorers who joined around 2011 and spread the word that Worlds was still online, users began joining and a new wave of regulars arrived. It is still active to this day, and while it is not nearly as busy and lively as it used to be, there is a small sense of community among the several dozen people who still log in. Some OG Worlds users come back every now and then, too. It is a living and breathing museum, full of both old and new creations, and it's truly one of the only remaining ways to experience the spirit of the old internet. Worlds has inspired users to be innovative and artistic with their creations, whereas most other places on the web are so cookie-cutter and unremarkable by contrast.
This history lesson I just gave is by no means extensive. If you really are interested in the backstory behind Worlds, the Worlds Chat Wiki explains it best. And if you wanna jump right in and try it out, you can find copies of the WorldsPlayer available on the library at Worlio.com. 1900 is the version I personally recommend, though many World creators prefer to use 1890 while newbies like to use 1920+.
I need help with Worlds.
See the Tutorials section, and read this forum thread. If you are still confused, ask on the Worlio forums.
I want to submit Worlds content for this site.
Please email me, or contact me on Discord or XMPP. My contact information can be found on bonkmaykr.xyz. I will credit your name if I decide to feature your work.
Is the cult real?
No LMAO, don't be silly. It's a huge meme. If you think the Worlds cult is real, then I'm sorry, but you're going to walk away very disappointed. There's nothing scary here. What there is, however, is a very interesting and sparkling universe for you to explore. That's what made me stay, after all.
Is Jimbly really a creep?
Also no. While a lot of people don't fall for the cult rumors, the rumors about Jimbly being a cyberstalker seem to catch a lot of people's eye without even a hint of skepticism. The meat of the accusation comes from an old blog on Worlds started by a member of /x/ sometime around 2012. Essentially, the rumor goes that Jimbly had an exclusive club for sharing photos and that people were having their photos stolen and used for blackmail, something along those lines. There just isn't anything true about this and there has never been actual proof that the photos in the Mugshot hallway were stolen or that revenge pornography was used to threaten anyone. Jimbly does have a porn world called 3DSexStreet (if you can make porn on any platform or in any engine, it will be made, that's just a fact of life), but it's just a generic world with a lot of spicy textures/GIFs and nothing else to write home about. The Mugshots hallway is a hallway where people voluntarily submit selfies to show who they are in real life and get a closer connection with the people they meet online. There were reportedly multiple of these back in the day but Jimbly's hallway is the big one known to still exist and it's still being updated, though updates have slowed down starting in 2023. Users now usually submit memes, screenshots of their Youtube channels to promote themselves, pictures of their pets, or a whole host of other things, it's not really just for mugshots anymore.
So to wrap things up, Jimbly has a giant collection of user-submitted images that has been updated continuously over the course of many years, and for some reason I can't quite understand, someone decided to make up some bullshit and say that it was a gallery full of stolen porn. If you have actual proof this has ever happened then shoot it my way, otherwise, please be mindful when you spread accusations like this. Jimbly has been very nice and patient whenever I've interacted with him.
Worlds won't run on my computer!
Please read this forum thread.
Where do I download WorldsPlayer?
One, scroll up. Two, Google is your friend.
What did you make this site with?
I wrote every line of CSS and markup by hand. Anything that is generated from templates is proably handled by me too, save for any ad banners or webring embeds.
I'm on an old computer, and KangWorlds is buggy or something isn't displayed right.
I made this site with HTML5 in mind first and so some older browsers are going to struggle. Mypal gives the best results on older systems as of today. I have plans to rework Kangworlds with a theming system and organize things better for older browsers in the future.
What page generator do you use?
The templates are created by me. They're either baked into the HTML the old-fashioned way, or loaded using Javascript.
How do I make my own site?
The "Learn" section on Neocities has some good resources. I taught myself using Mozilla DN and w3schools. As someone with a notable amount of experience, let me take this opportunity to educate you on a few things:
1. HTML and CSS are not programming. They are a document format. If you want to make things interactive, use Javascript.
2. Do NOT use large web frameworks unless you are building a web app that needs all of those features and it is not performance-sensitive. Trust me. Experienced developers hate this, and users who notice will hate it too. Using CSS/HTML generators is fine so long as they are efficient. PureCSS looks promising. Learn some PHP I/O or some Javascript networking if you wanna write your own very basic HTML importer.
Does KangWorlds have social media?
Yes! I post some short videos of Worlds.com on Tiktok and Youtube. Just be careful when looking for other Worlds related content since a lot of it is dumb clickbait "journalism".