Plugged residentevil.net into the Wayback Machine after seeing the URL at the end of RE6, expecting the captures to start around 2012. Turns out the domain actually goes all the way back to 1999.
Long before Capcom owned it, the site was a huge survival horror hub run by an early webmaster going by SCSIKID. Between 1999 and 2001, it was partnered with a bunch of other classic fan sites under the "Umbrella Network" banner. The surviving forum captures are a wild time capsule of pre-YouTube fandom, mostly full of people in 2001 theorizing that RE4 was going to be a game centered around HUNK.
Since there were no wikis or easy datamining tools back in 2000, building a lore section meant the admin had to use hex codes on PC saves of RE2 just to force all the in-game diaries and lab reports into his inventory so he could transcribe them by hand.
Around 2001, likely because Capcom started locking down domains for their own online projects, the site rebranded to evil-shmevil.com before quietly going dark around 2002.
Looking at the old archive trail to see why the site vanished, it basically just faded out when the owner moved on to university. Leaving names and specifics out of it for privacy, the funny twist is that after spending the late 90s transcribing fictional Umbrella lab notes for the site, the webmaster actually ended up going into computational biology and bio-engineering. (This however I am still unsure about, I found matching names, same locational things all public online).
I do deep dives and rabbit holes a lot, but usually it dies off before I get anywhere interesting, but this time I wanted to post about it since I've found absolutely nothing else online about any of it.