The lost internet communities thread

[Giftfromme]

So yeah a random thread about lost internet communities

Have you been part of a community that has vapourised for whatever reason? Is it a diminished version of its former self? Are there 5 people posting now where there were 500 posting before? Are there any usernames that stayed with you, even past the ashes of those past forums? Any idiosyncrecies about the forum/s you remember?

So I shall tell of my forum journey

Phase 1 (2005?)I started because I had some issue with HL1, can't remember what it was, but I googled it, and halflifesource forums came up as one of the first results. I had never signed up before, but read some of the threads for a few days, and signed up to my first forum with the silliest name I could think of: Giftfromme

The one big thing about the forums was about the "flames" and how you burnt someone. The biggest insult on those forums was to be labelled as someone who had "weak flames" or was "shit at flaming" etc. So a number of threads degenerated into people saying flames were shit etc. and some users backing the more popular users etc. It basically came down to the most "popular" users having the "best" flames by virtue of votes and popular agreement lol, not actual content. The forum would not have been complete without its own lore and imagined glory, which was the "masters of flaming" who had stopped posting about 2 years prior to when I signed up. Every flame was compared to the old glorious past and how flames "these days" were shit. Anyway, HL2 came out and the forum started to slowly die, as the forums had mostly been kept alive by news (real or otherwise) about HL2. Then the admin along with another mod (skybert I still remember the name lol) started to ban people, close threads, etc. The forum became shit basically.

Phase 2. A user made a forum called thebetrayed and everyone who was still active went over there almost immediately. The forum was going pretty well with more relaxed rules etc. until it came to one point where a particular member who had many aliases, became a bit of an issue. The main admin (Raptrojo) made (Humanoid) a co-admin. That would turn out to be a mistake. Raptrojo would continually ban the member who was being annoying, and Humanoid would unban him. This went on for a while but it could not continue. Something had to implode, and well it did. Humanoid decided he had enough, and deleted (yes deleted) the ENTIRE forum lol. So that was over and we enter phase 3.

Phase 3. Another user (n00bster) makes the next forum lameshout (halflifesource had become gameshout now) and now there were fewer users on the board. It continued for a while until he realised the community was dying and he didn't want to pay the forum bills anymore. Another user (Dave) archived the forum on his own server for a while, but at this point there were almost no posts and no point in keeping it alive. I think it finally ended in 2010. It was closed forever.

So yeah those are my fun times with the forums. I can't even find the gameshout site anymore, but it looked really shit, and all activity died when they decided they wanted a more "mature" forum.

The funniest moment in all of the forums was when one of the members, a very angry person, had made a forum for his own clan. A member of the betrayed decided to hack it and open it for anyone to use, with whatever name they wanted. Queue one of the funniest moments in my life, as I was in a computer lab at the time surrounded by people, and it was getting increasingly difficult not to laugh and the pressure to hold it in was mounting. Basically for a few hours I, along with a number of others, decimated threads with the dumbest shit imaginable, and the longest names, etc. I can't really convey how funny that was really. All manner of images were being posted in threads. I guess if I was at home at the time it wouldn't have been as funny, but since I had to hold it in at the lab, it became funnier.

So yeah any of you guys got any forum tales?

 

[Chemical Alia]

I used to have a Super Mario website/forum that had a really active community from 2003 to about 2007. Then I more or less lost interest and ran out of time to update it, and it eventually was consumed by a Russian spambot virus thing that got on my outdated joomla or whatever. But it was great at the time. The whole site got started practically because of a flame war, and we had a lot of adventures in trolling other sites.

I had one guy write me a five page poem in fake blood about his "hell called exile" after getting banned. That was my favorite.

Spoiler

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Ever heard of Team Gizka? They were the first group to make a major stab at creating a restoration mod for Knights of the Old Republic 2. They imploded and crashed into Oblivion after a prolonged death period when the forums ate each other.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Well, there's the first online forum I ever frequented...The one that taught me to behave intelligently online.

ArmageddonGames.net.

It's....Pretty much dead now. I came back to it 2 years or so after I left it, and...well...No one posts anymore. It's pretty much completely dead.

It saddens me, because that was one of the only forums I've ever been on where everyone was a recognizable face. I knew pretty much everyone on that site after a while, and it was like having a bunch of buddies to chat with.

I have only ever come across one other forum where I got that feeling. Every other site (including the escapist) has so many users posting all the time that I feel like I don't "know" anyone, because there are too many people to know and remember. No offense, but the majority of people here (with a few exceptions) are all just a mesh of comments to me, and less like real people...

 

[DoPo]

I'm on several GameFAQs boards. Most have a really low population. Heck, I thought I was the only remaining person on one of those boards (and I most probably was) until one of the "old timers" returned and made a thread a few weeks ago about "the good old times". It got three responses including mine. Another board still has a fair amount of "old timers"...considering nobody new is even showing up. The board is so much in the process of dying that even trolls stopped coming to it. Several years ago. If you are on GameFAQs, you know your board sucks if the trolls avoid it.

I used to be part of a different forum devoted to creating a role playing game. Well, I was there almost from the start until it was abandoned by the other, erm, four or five people, I believe. Then the admin and the mod returned and I joined them for a while but it sort of died again. I tried going there again several weeks ago but the forum just doesn't exist.

Slightly amusing although not strictly related to the topic: I was part of a small community devoted to old classic games. Think GOG only they didn't sell anything. So yeah, I posted on the forums for a bit until I had to stop (I couldn't continue for sort of RL reasons, no conflicts or other stuff). This was back in 2008, last year I came back to the forums due to nostalgia. First thing I noticed was that the community had shrunk massively - from 20-ish people, it was down to around 5-7. All of them from "back then". Second, the forums had been moved, which had caused all accounts to be locked. You had to contact the admin to restore your account. The claim "I used to post with account X, can I have it back?" were taken on good faith. And the third thing I noticed was the URL. The forums were hosted at my university (all students get free hosting space). I was like "WTF? The world can't be that small". Turned out the admin, and one of the members (friend IRL), started the year after me. The worst part? The world can really be that small - the admin shared a house with a guy from my town that I knew.

Let me put that into perspective - I'm an international student. I stopped posting because I couldn't access the website from abroad. So then, I finally met the admin for real and even bought him a beer.

 

[king_katchit]

I had one guy write me a five page poem in fake blood about his "hell called exile" after getting banned. That was my favorite.

That is somewhere between the funniest thing I have ever read, and the creepiest.

Anyway, every knows if you wish to be taken seriously, you have to use real blood...

 

[Vault101]

I have only ever come across one other forum where I got that feeling. Every other site (including the escapist) has so many users posting all the time that I feel like I don't "know" anyone, because there are too many people to know and remember. No offense, but the majority of people here (with a few exceptions) are all just a mesh of comments to me, and less like real people...

I think if youre on here consistantly enough you do tend to recognise some people and their usuall posting style (or at least I do)

 

[Chased]

I have only ever come across one other forum where I got that feeling. Every other site (including the escapist) has so many users posting all the time that I feel like I don't "know" anyone, because there are too many people to know and remember. No offense, but the majority of people here (with a few exceptions) are all just a mesh of comments to me, and less like real people...

I think if youre on here consistantly enough you do tend to recognise some people and their usuall posting style (or at least I do)

I like to think that all of the posters on the Escapist are different shades of my multidimensional personality that exist on a myriad planes that just happen to converge at this one point. Of Course I am the only one that is truly self aware.

OT: I used to post on the official MTG Forums for some time under the name Enter_the_Void. Those forums are still alive and well but the people that made up a good meat of the community have also left.

 

[Flailing Escapist]

This is really the only place I post anything. Occasionally I'll drop something by 3-4 other sites but that's mostly just questions. The only "shenanigan" that I can recall begins with a Z [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/profiles/view/Zeel] and ends with an eel [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/profiles/view/Zeel].... most of you probably remember it.

 

[Sleepy Sol]

I still remember Nintendo's official forums (the NSider ones). It was my first forum experience as a kid who hadn't reached the double digits in age yet, and I loved it. However, I lost the time to really post there after a little while.

...A few years later, I came back to Nintendo's site hoping to reconnect with the NSider community. I learned that Nintendo had forgone their forums permanently for some reason. To this day there is no replacement for the old forums save a technical support forum.

Fans and prominent faces within the NSider community did make an NSider2 website trying to mimic the experience of the old forums, but it just wasn't the same for me, and I left those forums after just a month or two.

That's about all I've got.

 

[Fappy]

I used to post on the CBR forums a lot 5-6 years ago until I realized that no matter how many comic books I read I would still be completely incapable of keeping up with half of the debates being had there.

And yes... about 7 years ago I used to be a Gaiafag. What can I say? Kept my writing skills sharp and helped me develop RP skills I now use for DnD :3

 

[Midnight Crossroads]

Several. One was an RPG website I started up with some friends over the Internet. Good place, very well fleshed out, but the numbers dropped off. This one, I actually miss because I was really invested in the world creation. I wrote some backstory for it, and was quite proud of my work.

Another was a website containing those same people I was talking about. They were big members of the community to the point that the administration felt threatened. He banned them permanently, and learned that a community is what makes a forum. Most of the contributers, myself included, were friends of those two. We left in protest. I go back every couple of months to look at the wasteland it's turned into. The mods don't even try to do their job anymore. The schadenfreude I feel when I visit is delectable.

There was one site driven into the ground by the creator. It was a webcomic which restarted halfway through the third act. Literally, the creator decided to redraw and reupload every page of her comic. This went on for six months I believe. By the time it was done, everyone was gone except maybe a half dozen people who continued to post in the same three threads for years. I still check up on it every so often, and they're still posting. No one ever makes a new account. I don't know how that even works. I suspect it's just bots designed to bring in ad revenue by making it appear as if there's some community. How else can someone have 10k+ posts on such a dead board?

Then of course, there is one which isn't dead in reality as dead to me. The only people I enjoyed talking with left the board for various reasons or were banned. There's no point in being the only four year plus guy left on a board.