So how many "hey what if I made a forum" forums have you been on? (or, random forum-related chatter)

[TennaLotor]

I've been on a couple of "hey what if i made a forum" type places - one or two back when forums were the main form of talking to each other, and then a few more recently like this one, where someone kinda spun up a forum in 202x for the lulz.

I also ran a forum once. I don't like to think about the time I did that. I was, like, 16, and avoiding details, it was a community a 16 year old should not have been managing. It did give me my first experience running server software, though, which has kinda turned into my career and also my hobby, just without all the bits that gave me endless anxiety.

[ARKYmouse]

Never had my own dot-com to build off of. Well, I had one very temporarily, but it was my friend's doing back in high school. He ran up like, 800 dollars on his mother's credit card and got in deep shit for it

Aside from that, I did run a couple of InvisionFree webBB forums on a free license. They were mostly just a general hang-out or roleplay environment with a small crowd of friends I personally knew. One instance got pretty active for a few months during my junior year in high school.

[Jess]

I want people to use the forum but here's hoping it doesn't end up costing me $800

[SnepperStepper]

There was something my sister clued me onto back when I had furst gotten a deviantART account (wowza, its been that long huh) that was a lark for a while. petered out eventually. Then there was the utterly failed group-chat-as-a-message-board thing from high school. DSUltimate was a very good time back in the day of cheesing the Action Replay HEX values to do shiz like make 400 identical playable Mario models for fun. Supposedly that was made in the admin's basement on a whim when it was new. More recently I've signed up for a half-dead analog video forum I'm trying to revive and a mostly-unhelpful Cadillac board that I'm trying to get some answers in from my own experience to even out the questions. I think that's relatively official, though, so I doubt it counts here.
Now this! Its been a hot minute since I've been digging the atmosphere on sign-up so I'm excited to be here!

[SatyricalSol]

All the forums I partook in were ostensibly in service to some other institution—a webcomic, a game, a guild for said game, etc. Some were prone to having splinter forums but moderation was generally pretty even-handed, so the people making splinter forums to get away from that usually weren't a great crowd.

Though the webcomic ones in particular were related in name only and would evolve into their own entity over the years.

[Jess]

Yea, the first forums I really took part in were the Bob and George forums way back when, spent a lot of time there. There were other forums, but I didn't hang out as much lmao

After that I got into Furcadia, and then deviantart, and then Twitter took off, and then Discord, so overall I didn't spend time on a lot of different forums haha

This forum is technically for my games, if only so that it has a rock to build on top of, because I think there's a lot of retro hangout forums already lmao so like, it's Roxy's game forum, but there's a lot of other stuff that can build on top of that. It's worked well for the Discord

[DrgnBeauty]

the first forum i was involved with was when the super mario bros crossover dev went "hey what if i made a forum" way back in like...2011? 2012?? then the dev kinda kicked most of the community off that forum so we ended up going to a different forum, which has since shut down because that was around when discord became a thing. i also ran my own forum in the past around 2015, though that didn't last very long!

[Frozen Salad]

Dang I was on a anime forum like 20 years ago I don't even remember the name of but it was a big part of my online life. I have an account for Something Awful message board and it's pretty great & active, I wish there was more like it.

[SatyricalSol]

Dang I was on a anime forum like 20 years ago I don't even remember the name of but it was a big part of my online life. I have an account for Something Awful message board and it's pretty great & active, I wish there was more like it.

To answer your question from the other thread (since it fits here a 'lil better):

Hey buddy any of those three [forums] still around?

Two of them still are, surprisingly. The Pokemon-X sprite comic (originally from 2003, way predated the game xd) and NationStates, a nation simulation game & worldbuilding community where most of my creative output was channeled into writing short stories about fantasy athletes.

The third one, and my most prolific/embarrassing, was indeed lost to the sands of time. The companion forum for a browser-based MMO called ChosenSpace which at the time we called F2P Eve, but in hindsight a WAY better approximation is toaster-compatible Elite: Dangerous. Technically I played the v2 version, which allowed you to have more than one ship but that was practically impossible unless you put actual money into the game (which, as a high schooler, I did not have to spare).

That game was interesting bc it was ahead of its time in a few ways. The microtransactions for a secondary currency which was used for the most desirable features, in this case building ships. There was a free trickle of 'points' from voting for it on those old MMO ranking sites, but even religiously doing it didn't amount to much of anything. You had an energy bar that limited how much you could fly around the galaxy at a time, with it gradually refilling from empty in 24 hours. Kinda called the direction the industry would take with Farmville and mobile games in general when these games were developed in like 2006-2008.

Then the guy making it (it was one primary dev almost the entire time, afaik) put together a kickstarter to recruit a team and make v3, but they ran out of money like maybe 10% of the way into development and went dark and that's when the forum went offline for good :)

[listeninggarden]

forums make up the vast majority of my online interactions, dating back to some bbs access in my youngest years into the general explosion of forum software and the proliferation of phpbb/nuke which was absolutely everywhere for the longest time. over decades, i was on all manner from smaller communities to larger ones that covered common interests (music, webcomics, etc... ), even ran a few of my own for friend groups through free hosting providers. my oldest and dearest friends happen to mostly be from a forum for an online game i joined back in the early 00s. met a lot of incredibly interesting people and went on some wild little journeys thanks to forums. i only really started breaking away some time after resetera was created, though i still miss the format of forum posting and the slower and more deliberate pacing of interactions within the framework of accessible online communities.