with forums becoming an increasingly uncommon form of communication in this day and age (unfortunately), i’m curious to know if there are other forums out there that you guys frequent, or do you only visit this one?
as of currently:
bulbagarden (pokemon forum)
universal gaming (other gaming forum)
rllmuk (other gaming forum, though i lurk here and don’t have an account there yet)
melonland (forum that has an old internet aesthetic to it and mostly about the old web)
and this one!
i like lurking different forums to see if they have a friendly enough environment (and decent rules) before i join them. it’s also the reason why i joined this one; every just seems so chill and cool!
I’m newer to this particular forum but I was active in a couple forums back in the day. I get overwhelmed by social media and even medium sized discord communities so I appreciate the slower, asynchronous way that forums work. I’ve been finding this one easy to peek into when it pleases me without all the conversations having moved on and been replaced
I still lurk the shmups forums from time to time, but this is the primary place you’ll see me post. I used to be a member of the PC Music forums during the label’s heydays (it still remains up afaik, but nobody’s posted on it in years).
it’s nice to have an internet home. this place is a good 'un :)
i visit https://forum.fami.club/ from time to time because i know one of the creators, but since it’s small it’s not super active
otherwise, the last time i visited multiple forums was about 10-ish yrs ago when i was part of GT Planet and the Spotify community forums. before that i used to race Gran Turismo 5 leagues that were run on the official PlayStation forums
I lurk on Styleforum, a menswear community, mostly to peep folks’ outfits. Many years ago, I posted on the Unfiction forums, which were dedicated to ARGs and puzzle trail websites. Those were cool but I’d be surprised if the forums are still active.
This is the only place I interact with people on the 'net period. I spent tons of time on the EGM forums as a teen, both pre and post move to 1up. Specifically EGM non-gaming related aka EGM NGR, which was just a fun hang out where we still talked about games, but also tons of other media related stuff. That was my favorite online place, despite the fact that it was full of early form edge lords. (Although there was less hate back then, and more so just felt like a barrier of snobbery & general disdain you had to breakthrough.)
I’ve been mostly absent from the internet for the past 10+ years, and I abandoned the idea of participating in social media before that break. So luckily I’ve never been hooked on, or even participated on twitter and the like. I thought the world moved on from slow, longer form stuff without me, and that forums had no longer existed. So finding the IC forums was an excellent surprise.
Until I found this place, I was perfectly content to just use the internet purely for utility purposes. So it’s been nice to find an online hangout again, except better because people here are mature, cool, and vary in tastes. And it helps me see what’s going on around the recreational side of the web without having to engage with social media.
But this is the extent of my interest when it comes to engaging with the web.
I’ve been on Something Awful since I was a teenager (I’m 37 and have a 2003 registration date there) and while it has a very, very steep learning curve (the phrase back in the day everyone used was “lurk more”) it’s still one of the best places to talk about baseball or Gundam or whatever.
I don’t necessarily get a feeling of like, community from either there or IC, but I think that’s a function of my being similar to @Slink in the post above: I don’t have any social media accounts and my earnest attempt to be part of a Discord community that’s kinda-sorta adjacent to this ended up making me feel really awful with how people treated one another in the end, so IC and SA are really the last places I have any online social interaction on.
There’s this general sense I have of my being a little afraid that I’m maybe just too stodgy and “not online enough” to keep up with the lingo and pace and tastes of folks in most online communities, and IC is small enough that it never feels like I’m missing out on “the posting meta”
I’ve had a lot of personal fun with my personal Neocities site pretending it’s like the old days though!
I love forums. I’d say I’m currently active on two, one being here and the other Talking Time, though I generally post at most a couple of times a week between the two. I was on the MiSTer forums for a while, and I’ve had the odd brief membership on others. Much more often I lurk, or just dip in for specific questions. Like @defcon I take the odd look at styleforum, though without adblockers I find it near unusable on mobile which is pretty much the only way I use the web these days. I’ve also spent a lot of time reading cycling forums the last couple years since I started cycling to work. Basically whatever I get interested in I start looking at forums for. Often if I’m searching for info on something and all the google results are just ads that vaguely relate to what I’m after or SEO nonsense or AI slop I’ll add “forums” to the search terms. Or “reddit”, which I’m not a member of but I think is technically a forum?
There are a few things I like about forums - firstly and most importantly that posts are generally by actual people saying what they actually think. So many websites now are just useless, or their information is fatally compromised by commercial interest. Randos on forums aren’t necessarily knowledgeable about what they’re talking about or correct in their advice, but it seems to be as close you as you can get to just talking to someone (who might not know anything either). And a forum about a specific topic tends to attract people who care about that topic. Stumbling across the equivalent of @chazumaru’s Saturn 30th anniversary posts but describing different types of wood chisel or something is a magical experience. I also like that there’s a degree of permanence. Old forum threads are often full of broken images and dead links, but just today I was reading forum posts about bikes from fifteen years ago that are still useful and informative. Would’ve been better with the photos, but still pretty good.
Nope, this is my only forum. I used a couple final fantasy fan message boards when I was very young, but most of my formative years on the internet were spent on IRC. Oh and 4chan. I guess that’s a message board?
I grew out of 4chan and I also grew out of a solid half of my IRC friends. And this itself was still like more than 10 years ago. I hung out in a couple video game discords that were pretty cool, but checked out eventually. Heard about the IC forum from the show and thought it might be fun to have a forum in my life again. I was right!
You’d think, given my IRC days, I’d be more into Discord, but nowadays I really do not want to join a Discord.
This is the only one I currently go to. I was semi-active on Talking Time a long time ago and really active on ShinraOnline even longer ago. Big RIP to the conceptart.org forums, I loved that place to bits before its co-founder did whatever he did to get the forums deleted and the rest of the site shut down.
I was very active on 4chan from like 2006 or 7 to off and on throughout the 2010s. I posted on /v/ /a/ and /g/ mostly and then later /vr/ with peaks at other boards, and other image boards like 420. Anonymity was in hindsight too tempting a crutch for someone with an anxiety disorder and I wish I’d found an online community to belong to between about 2012 to the IC relaunch because as 4chan became nazified I turned completely to social media and even rejoined fb to keep in touch with the queer and trans communities I was trying to become a part of.
Now I basically don’t touch my fb ever, or my twitter, but I use ig a little more than I’d like and reddit way way too much. I don’t know what I’m trying to get out of bsky.
I’m open to joining other forums though and would be most interested in something like styleforum but for women’s streetwear/techwear or maybe somewhere like that but gender agnostic.
I’m active only here and on a much smaller one called auldnoir. I used to be active on the GPXPlus forums (back when I was a moderator for them) and…there’s someplace deep in my memory that I also was on, but all I remember about it is that I was there before Kingdom Hearts 2 was released/Roxas’s name was announced, because it was back when we still called him Blond-Haired Kid/BHK.
I poke into others from time to time but none have really had the sense of community this one does. Not in the same way, at least. I think what helps is that this forum is centered more around a sensibility than a tangible single “thing” (podcast notwithstanding…), which makes it a better environment for discussion and socialization than, say, a forum about video games released for arcades or so on. Which is to say, it’s nice to have these more specific forums in the back pocket when such a desire for them arises, but I’m gonna be spending most of my time in the place with cool people who I like because they are nice to be around
i look at guitar forums a lot because it’s the only reliable way to learn about cool new effects pedals and often the best place to buy/sell secondhand stuff. also if you have a weird technical thing you don’t know how to fix, chances are that with good pictures and clear communication somebody has dealt with it before and will help you out.
the problem is as these communities age up (even the younger more alternative ones versus the boomer-heavy rock/blues/country/jazz sites) they become more and more insufferable.
I have been a member of a (now mostly quiet) Lunar fandom forum for over 20 years, and I’ve had a few other forums I’ve called home over the years. (Anyone ever encounter $pac3fem?)
The Lunar one is very quiet because the regulars pretty much grew up and until late last year Lunar didn’t have much to look forward to. But I’ve met several of the members in real life. It was a good place to be at a time I was learning to function socially with people I wasn’t forced to be around.
What seems like forever ago, I was a regular on rec.games.video.arcade on usenet. But in terms of ‘modern’ communities, I also very infrequently participate on the Madman’s Café, which is 100% a relic of the old internet that’s still in existence, even if it’s not exactly still vibrant. Back around 2008 I also posted on Gamers Quarter, a forum that’s (afaik) no longer in existence.
I don’t do much on social media sites at all though, but I have an Instagram account for looking at cats and posting about tattoos, a bluesky that I don’t think I’ve ever posted on, and a tumblr for sharing dumb fandom bullshit with my partner.
Right now? Just here. I could see joining something else if I there was a hobby or helping reason to. It’s nice just to hang out a bit, seem some familiar and new avatars.
In middle/high school, our friend group ran some private servers, making levels for “Zelda Online” right about when they rebranded as a legally distinct “Graal Online”. I was on the official forum’s off topic section, but more as a teen sponging up the worldwide web of social etiquette while contributing barely anything.
I was also enamored with fighting games. Very easy to emulate and there were so many awesome characters and games. Friends were more into bemani than fighters, so I eventually found my way, but never really posted much at, HigherVoltage and MadMan’s Cafe. Pretty safe to assume one of those sites is how I also found IC too.