If you browse neocities with any degree of frequency, you've probably come across this site. It's not particulary apparent as to what it is. Who made it? What purpose does it serve? That's what I set out to find out in making this post.
What I've figured out:
It seems to be owned by an industrial food manufacturing/processing company, though I have not found its name, based in Sweden. The website itself is entirely dedicated to tracking the conditions and yield of their equipment. Going down the main page, we have:
- time date vnum - Seems to be tracking the currrent time, date, and version(?).
- percent% Socker(kg), yield - Seems to be tracking the yield and maybe efficiency of sugar production. Clicking on percent takes you to a page with a graph tracking the same information (this trend follows for the rest).
- percent% Glukos(kg), yield volume?m^3 - Tracking glucose production.
- FAB 02 - A second facility?
- It goes on in a similar format, except volume is replaced with temperature and each machine is numbered, and also some have a traffic light emoji (🚦) followed by another number in a different font size+color. There is glukos(glucose) x2, fett(fat) x2, vitamin(which one isn't specified), rostfri(stainless(???)), and huvud(head)(there is also no yield for this one so it's probably not for fabrication).
- ASPE date @ time - This one seems to be a bit ahead of the time at the beginning.
- VARO date @ time - Same time as one above. Also, aspe and varo seem to be locations in Sweden, but they might be referring to something else, too. I checked the locations in Google Maps, but couldn't find any clear matches.
- time date ⇧ num - The date here is the first of the month, so I'd bet that this tracks monthly changes in productivity.
So, that's what I could find out myself, but what about other people? Well, a preliminary search, searching 'gfab' in a search engine, returned garbage, and restricting the search to site:neocities.org returns only the site itself (or no results in the case of marginalia). It's fairly likely that, even if someone has figured out more than me, that it hasn't been posted anywhere.
Going to its neocities site page, we can find a few more points of interest. The first thing that stands out is the views: why are there so many? Well, this is a pretty easy question. You see, this site is updated every few minutes, so everyone that sorts sites by recent updates will see the page there. Since neocities counts seeing a page there as a view, it is only natural that it accumulated so many over the years.
There are also a few pages that follow this one. Unfortunately, aside from two of them, they all follow a large portion of the most viewed sites, and so likely don't possess any insight here. The two exceptions have long since been abandoned, so there won't be any insights that weren't posted while they were active.
One of them seems to have no information whatsoever. The other one is similar, with there being no information on their site. However, on their profile, we can see that they left two comments on gfab's profile (which were liked by the other account, interestingly enough). They also posted them again in Swedish. They read as follows:
"I previously posted an essay, in your comments, on my interest in your findings (this site is old, and can, yet rarely, have issues such as misappropriate deletion), as well as my concerns on replication and accuracy. Your charts do not follow the standard process of experimentation, the scientific method, i understand i am ignorant about the topic, variables, goals, and process."
"With the credibility issues being addressed, the "publications" you have made via public charts, data, and measurements, seem flawed. There is no way, with the publications available, to prove your findings, or even prove the experiment as valid. As far as i am concerned, the publications are used as subjects of bewilderment to a curious audience. I wish you to indulge me. Instagram -> @qqqqshanepppp"
The instagram account still exists, but it's private and only has one post to its name anyway. Their site also links to a youtube channel, which doesn't seem to have any useful information. They also list an email address, which I'll send an email to after posting this.
Anyways, regarding the comments themselves: judging by what we see now on gfab, I'd say its pretty likely that the comments misinterpreted the site's contents. It's also possible that gfab had significantly different contents from what we see today. On the wayback machine for the site, we do see some minor but significant differences from today, but it doesn't seem like a major shift ever occurred (note, however, that the earliest capture was in 2021, and the comments were left in 2019/2020).
If I recieve a reply to the email I will send, I will update this. UPDATE: The email address doesn't exist. Maybe it did at one point, but it doesn't anymore.