NomansiteNews / 6 July 2026
Reading footers in twenty languages
«Site by», «Realisierung», «Réalisation», «Разработка сайта» — the algorithm that turns the bottom of a stranger's website into a fact about a studio, and everything that tried to fool it.
The idea is simple: a studio signs what it builds. The execution is not.
The signature has to be found in twenty languages, in markup written by thousands of different people, at the bottom of pages that carry tens of kilobytes of scripts after the visible content. It has to survive a logo instead of text, a link without a formula, a formula without a link.
What tried to fool it
Almost everything, and each case taught the algorithm something.
- Engines and themes. The first pass crowned an academic publishing system that sits in the footer of every scientific journal it powers. It is not a studio, it is software.
- Photo credits. The same word «by» introduces the author of a photo, an icon set, a typeface. A signature next to the wrong noun is not a signature.
- Neighbours. A window around the link that stops mid-tag picks up the class name of the link next door — and a real credit gets thrown away as a font credit.
- Shorteners and messengers. A share link in a footer looked exactly like a credit until we noticed a URL shortener with three «signed sites».
The rule that came out of it
One signature is an observation. Two is an occupation. A domain enters the register on its second signature, because a client's marketing department can sign once, and so can a contractor with a single job. The threshold costs us thousands of entries and is the reason the ones that remain mean something.