What community message boards and forums did you frequent?

[mary]

Are you still a part of any message boards or forums?
Which ones did you visit back in the day?

I think a lot of the people who used forums in the 2000s have moved onto facebook groups and reddit, which take on a more formal tone - though I do think those newer spaces still output high quality content from its members.

The HERInteractive Nancy Drew pc games still have an active message board but the mods on there power trip all the time!!! I remember even back in 2015 they wouldn't allow you to mention lgbtqa ships because 'sexual content' was banned but people could ramble on about Ned/Nancy ship all day smh...
That being said I love the messageboard experience and how each has its own biome hehehe

[m15o]

I love forums!

I'm really grateful Melon started this one, which is one of my favorite. I enjoy the aesthetic, the people, the topics, the fact that it feels "small" in that people aren't strangers. It rekindled my appreciation for forums so much that it made me want to create a forum software (that's now used on status cafe).

I think a lot of the people who used forums in the 2000s have moved onto facebook groups and reddit, which take on a more formal tone - though I do think those newer spaces still output high quality content from its members.

True... around the beginning of the 2010's we started using our real names and not pseudonyms anymore. It instantly adds formality, and even anxiety to share or write. And that's just one thing among the many. :omg:k:

[mary]

Very true! Back in the days of the old web I remember having a list of websites to hit every day, checking updates/messages/changes. for most ppl, that muscle hasn't been worked in a decade because all of our content is on the same 5 sites + those sites are all owned by the same companies!! that said, the forum revival won't be easy but the people who are dedicated will get a lot out of it!

[ellievoyyd]

i dont know how i ran across it but i used to be obsessed with a forum called GameTalk!!!

also, it doesnt count as a message board i guess but i wrote tons of fanfiction.net ages ago. lol. fanfiction.net obviously was more open about lgbt stuff and honestly that was part of where i got awakened cause i mainly wrote yaoi slash fics :omg:k:

[demonologi]

i honestly don't remember the forums i used to frequent, i remember being a part of a couple of furcadia roleplay forum communities etc, and a couple of warriorcats ones. now, i occasionally frequent an organic gardening forum, and a permaculture forum. (permies!) i think this is the first one i've actually posted on in years though, i mostly just lurk in others and use them to find tips and resources.

[Kutan]

i remember being a part of a couple of furcadia roleplay forum communities

Come to think of it, is your avatar a Furcadia portrait? I always appreciated those custom portraits; that low res, low color depth pixel art is super cool to me!

[demonologi]

is your avatar a Furcadia portrait? I always appreciated those custom portraits; that low res, low color depth pixel art is super cool to me!

it is hahaha! 95x95 its the one i still use in-game, i still log in occasionally even though it's a ghost town now.

[cinni]

i honestly don't remember the forums i used to frequent, i remember being a part of a couple of furcadia roleplay forum communities etc, and a couple of warriorcats ones. now, i occasionally frequent an organic gardening forum, and a permaculture forum. (permies!) i think this is the first one i've actually posted on in years though, i mostly just lurk in others and use them to find tips and resources.

i was on a few warrior cats rp forums too! god i long have forgotten what they were though .. xP i was really into warriorcats rp'ing on furc haha. i loved those dreams when you could be a lil feral cat (before there were cat digos o_o)
p.s. your portrait + site are soo cool looking (✧ω✧)

another forum i'm on besides this one is pixelgardenmb!

i also frequented oekaki boards back in the day, when they were more commonplace :-p i don't think i personally drew in loish's board (i just can't remember the ones i DID draw in), but i followed her on deviantart and probably admired it from a distance. (it was normal to see some boards have a separate 'sketch' section and you had to try out to get into the 'regular/advanced' oekaki board.) i *swear* i saw a version of this site with a really elaborate splash page, but i can't find the link now haha. https://web.archive.org/web/20040904130052/http://oekaki.loish.net/

[Darmodej]

drawception my home
grew up on this place
then the userbase started to shift and i was entering the cringe saltlord phase of my teenage years and got booted out
but at this point everyone else had left for discord thats where my current friend group is

i also browse knockout forums, basically facepunch 2, mostly for the lmaopics thread and occasional informational videos
im kinda mixed on that place, on one side the things i mentioned, on the other sometimes the place gets extremely doomery

my first ever memory of using a forum was when i was somewhere 6-7 and i went to a russian bionicle forum and being a child instantly covered it in smiley spam and then the whole place shut down. oops.

[Neonriser]

The forums I used to frequent the most was Syndrone, an avatar site similar to Gaia Online. It had an excellent avatar customization system. I used to go there a lot during my college days in 2015-2017. Too bad it was shut down years ago.

[Memory]

I spent a lot of time on Coalition Forums in high school. Some of the big DBZ fan sites like King Nothing and The Cell Games banded together to create one forum that was really active for a while, but eventually the community got really negative and a lot of trolls moved in.

After that I went to Black Cell forums, which was only around for a little while before the owner disappeared out of nowhere, followed by Game Rulers, which was a very small site but the owner offered to host my first webcomic for a while.

Then were the ScrewAttack and Game Heroes forums. After those, I didn't visit another forum for years until finding this place.

It rekindled my appreciation for forums so much that it made me want to create a forum software (that's now used on status cafe).

That's really cool! Can I ask what technology you built it on? I made a PHP-based forum years ago that was basically phpBB with a few custom features.

[Loebas]

I used to be mainly on KH-vids, and KH13 back in the day. Sadly those forums have been abandoned ever since (apart from some posts in the spam section).

The websites still exist though.

[caracalled]

Ohh this thread is awesome!

I used to mainly frequent two German speaking forums, one called Sweet Amoris for a popular french dating sim at the time! I wasn't really interested in the game but the forum adjacent to it had a mainly female userbase which was awesome because it was like having a ton of older sisters and I essentially got to collect first experiences being on the internet without being groomed or seeing gore, etc. I loved it there! This one is even still a bit active! Might look if I can log in again!

And the other one was a swiss forum called detektiv-conan.ch which makes it clear what it's about hehe
It had (and still has!) a chatroom that I was always in playing skipbo and it would frequently get up to 30-40 people in chat at the same time! it was awesome and I really miss it!
It's still up and running but has a much smaller userbase, and I kind of want to make some more people join the forum and the chat again to revive it a bit!!

[schiavona]

Whoa, funny that this thread came back up, because I recently went looking for remnants of some of the old forums I was a part of that me and some pals set up back in the day for discussing creative projects, organizing game nights, and generally just being middle to high school weirdos. Sadly I don't know if the good ol' Internet Archive preserved anything that was hosted on Invisionfree or not (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) but I didn't have any luck finding any remnants of it. Oh well.

[cyberfun1 (dizz)]

i was on a few warrior cats rp forums too! god i long have forgotten what they were though .. xP i was really into warriorcats rp'ing on furc haha. i loved those dreams when you could be a lil feral cat (before there were cat digos o_o)
p.s. your portrait + site are soo cool looking (✧ω✧)

oh yeah i remember joining a warrior cats forum when i was in my warriors phase back in 5th grade, too bad i didnt actually interact in the forum at all, i rediscovered it while cleaning out the google account im planning to delete