I typed in a random string of words in the early days and added “.com”, and I ended up on some forum some random guy in Texas hosted for him and his friends. I was obviously a decade younger than everyone else, but it was the best of the internet. We knew each other by name, the link sharing was top notch, civil conversations, no one was making money off of it.
Checked it recently and it’s been down for a long time. The internet archive caught one snapshot of it in time. I can see my username on the homepage like looking at my own gravestone.
There was this forum I used for a decade. It was a support group for a few specific related medical conditions (I will lie if you ask. It was the fatal butt disease. The condition isn’t the important part), and after a couple years as a user they made me moderator over a small subforum (like fifteen of us were in the smaller group) for a medical research group. They were some of the closest friends I’ve ever made.
I’m the only person still alive in the research group (benefits of getting sick young I guess) and the last time I checked the forum, the latest post was ten months old. I owe them confidentiality, but with día de los muertos coming up I find my mind lingering on them more than usual.
I do miss forum culture; large chunks of digital history have been erased as forums vanished.
Culture on the web has changed as well; it has moved from communication with elements of performance, to performance with the illusion of communication.
that’s a fantastic way to characterize the the 2020s internet.
it also increasing feelings like that’s bleeding into real life, especially if you listen to how everyone wants to socialize but it feels like they can’t ever be honest or themselves because everyone expects a performance, which is also something I have noticed myself. The way people interact face to face has changed since the 2010s.
I feel like there are still many active forums around, it’s just that more generic spaces like this one are even more prevalent.
There were loads and oodles of dead forums around back in the day.
I also think we should differentiate between dead and just slow. Most forums are unlikely to be as lively as a social media thread.
This prompted me to look for mine and incredibly it’s still online and essentially unchanged.
https://www.otaku-attitude.net/
But it has had barely any activity since 2022. But I’m surprised it survived this long.
The feels, man
Similar feelings for a few communities that have existed since 2000. The posts are all there, but the people are all gone.
I’ve documented exploits like you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships that clip through space in Masters of Orion. I watched the six hidden cutscenes in Baldur’s Gate. All those moments will be lost in time…
Time to die.
I used to be much more of a hardcore archivist. Nowadays I’m glad some of my most prolific years’ output is just gone, never to be seen again.
Wait, hidden cutscenes in Baldur’s Gate?
I’m just riffing off the original lines.
gamefaqs walkthroughs
old forums i use are still around and active.
the users are all like 50-60 though. nobody under 50 uses them and nobody under 30 even knows what a ‘internet forum’ is.
We are on a modern Internet forum right now though. It just works a little differently.
reddit style stuff was never a forum. it’s a link aggregator that had a discussion on top.
forum structure is way more specialized and it’s not threaded, because each post is it’s own thread.
rn is forums but tin is not.
Every few years I check in on an old message board I was active on between like 1999-2010. It’s still there. Gets maybe 1-2 posts per year these days.
Those years line up well with SETI@home?
Huge flood of nostalgia for my folding team on the [h] forums. Thanks.
I’m sure this already exists but someone should make a forum aggregator. Read only with an open standard and make an account to join the discussion on the site. Basically just a fancy rss feed.
Creating a healthy new community takes a huge amount of activation energy or an incredibly long time. Why not just transplant the mature communities to more fertile ground? Bonus: it’s much harder to astroturf an entire forum than a few high visibility accounts.
I’m sure some forums wouldn’t want the extra traffic with no ad revenue. But discoverability would be a huge boost now that search engines are trying to be a black box Ai MitM. Anything other angle I’m missing?
It was unfortunate watching our forum die. It was a pretty busy space, lots of gaming info, participation and all that. The main damage was caused by our preferred game series studio killing private servers and mods with the next version of the game in favor of dev company paid servers with limitied and company approved mods. Pretty soon the seconday games we played followed suit. That caused a lot of the group to look for other games to play, modding was what we were all about. The forums were a lot of fun. A lot of people learning how to use the graphical tools for games and personlize their forum presence. I just looked at the wayback machine and it was a real blast from the past seeing all the names, all the servers, the activity…it was a good 5-8 years of my life.
I went back looking for mine to make sure the shit I said back then was good and deleted. “Site can’t be reached” Thank god!
Now I just need to go burn down the internet archive!
Lets see what happend to gamespy
Anyone
My niche forum split off from a comic about RPG games, eventually they moved to a FB group to keep contact but I stopped using FB. I dreamt about them a few nights ago, I miss the community we had.
