Support NeoGAF

[SigmasonicX]

I got my Internet start on The Sonic Foundation. I'm not sure how much I would have enjoyed it at my current age, but at the time, I thought it was a really fun place with a tight-knit community. There were a ton of group fanfics and RPs, which I just observed for a while until I finally joined in on a few, and it was great. In particular, there were the group fics Sonic World Tournament (a new one every year) and Station Square (a script-style sitcom), and I actually started an RP called The Crystal Chronicles, I believe. I'd say the forums had their heyday between Sonic Adventure 2 and Sonic Heroes, and after Sega stopped producing consoles, it definitely felt like a lot of the energy was drained from the site. Eventually, I just stopped going there, except to check in every year or so, until one day, there was nothing. All of the old threads are gone now.

And the thing is, for a period of time, I actually did have a bunch of the notable posts saved, since before a host transfer, the admin (Kedzie K) warned that some threads might be lost. When the transfer happened and nothing was lost, I deleted the posts I had saved.

There was also Sonic HQ, which still exists, I guess, but it's nothing like it used to be and it's definitely a shell of its former self. I didn't go there as much, but it's still a shame.

GameFAQs is still going strong, but I feel like the non-gaming communities used to be much better than they are now, particularly Anime and Manga - Other Titles.

 

[CelticKnight]

The news about Stargate made me check out if Gateworld was still around. Gateworld was THE stargate fansite, and it was pretty popping. I use to lurk there hard. Now it is just a shadow of it's former self.

I remember on that site they had a Q&A with (series co-creator) Brad Wright and I was so happy that they chose my question as one of the ones to ask.

Damn, feels like a lifetime ago...

 

[Lasthope106]

Digg.com
Reddit gaming
Bungie forums
Halo CE community
Xbox 1 community

I'm sure there are countless others, but those are the ones right off the top of my head. It seems that everything goes to shit, the more people that join a community.

 

[fates]

I don't know if Gundam.com counts because it didn't slowly die, admin pulled the plug on it and that was that. RIP

 

[NastyBook]

Chatbox.com

WBS Anime Chat

 

[The Albatross]

For sure. I was an admin of several large gaming based forums that all eventually petered out.

- Dexcussion, a videogame forum that was popular in the mid-late 90s from InterAct, eventually InterAct was bought by whoever owned GameSHark and the forums were combined and ultimately ruined. I was an admin at the GameShark forums after that but most of the regulars of both left to go to other sites. We all mostly split off to another forum that was just regulars from that site, and it was successful in spite of itself for us... But it eventually slowed down, got fragmented, and it still existed in a bastardized version but we all grew up and moved on. One of the old guys started a facebook group some 15 years (or more) after the original site and invited a bunch, it was a good -- though embarrassing -- trip down memory lane.

- MaddenPlanet (formerly MaddenCentral), a very popular sports gaming website that probably hit its height in the early 2000s. I was an admin for that forum and probably the top poster, and it was a very big Madden site in its day. It started losing steam around 2005 many of the long time members left, we got into a bunch of stupid forum wars, and then we spun it into something different for a couple of years but it wasn't going to last. I was still working on it with the founder of the site and had a successful sports gaming blog which was an off-shoot of it, but when I started working full time I lost the time and interest to put work into it, and eventually just let it go.

I'm Facebook friends with some of the guys from both of those sites, and freelance colleagues with one of them, and a handful of us follow each other on twitter and interact once in a while.

 

[StoneFox]

I joined (what was once a popular site) PokeDream's forums when I was 12 over ten years ago. It was a pokemon forum, and eventually evolved into a general hang out place where no one discussed pokemon, it was very chill lol we had high activity between 2004-2007 but it has slowly dwindled down to about 50 active members.

But man, we had some hilarious moments like trolling a babynames forums that threated legal action against us, going to "war" with other forums where we invaded each other, running corrupt moderators out, and other such things. I've made life-long friends there, and I traveled to the other side of the country just to do meetups. I'm sad to see it dying

 

[Evilisk]

This happened to pretty much every online community/forum I went to before coming to GAF

 

[PillarEN]

Cheapassgamer.com

Used to be super active in all the forum areas, great place to discuss games, liked it even better than here as I prefer having console specific forums to one catch all gaming forum.

It just slowly died off over the past 3 years or so. The deals forum is a cesspool just as bad as slickdeals, and there's barely in activity in gaming forums with just a handful of posts in many of them.

This one is a little sad to me because I joined the site back in high school I think. Things moved pretty slowly but at a speed that was easy to keep up with. Eventually I joined GAF and that was that. Probably posted a few more times at CAG in one of the threads that were like a community thread. Don't even lurk anymore. If I was in the States again though I would drop by the weekly deals threads. Those are key.

 

[El_Presidente]

The dragonballtoys.com forums were awesome. I got so much cool shit and learned even more. I was a young teenager and it was my first forum

 

[fates]

I used to post on AnimeonDVD.com a lot before they got bought out and the site pretty much went to shit.

used to post on there. Was undoubtedly the best place for anime news. As soon as Mania grabbed them I knew it was going to be the beginning of a slow death.

 

[blackflag]

Dark Ages of Camelot and our server board palomides.com. I think some people still post there though.

 

[Hankodank]

I really miss City of Heroes.
My first ever MMO and still my favourite.

Me too!

I still have all my stuff from the collector's edition - and all the comics they published.

I was really sad when they shut down the servers. The game had issues, for sure - but it was such a great experience...

 

[Aurongel]

iPodTouchFans (now renamed). Got my start in programming there but the poisonous community driven by idiot teenagers (myself included...) contributed to their downfall after a few years of being the absolute bastion of iPhone software.

 

[enzo_gt]

Bizarre Creations forum, until it was shutdown (alongside BC itself..).

 

[Eidan]

The Final Fantasy Online Forum was the first one I ever posted on. I was probably in 7th or 8th grade. No clue what its status is now.

 

[The Illiterati]

All of the old pc/console/ newsgroups in the 90's. All dead now.

Gone Gold until the site admin destroyed his own website and ejected his userbase.

Was also regular on Quarter to Three since the beginning, after reading Tom Chick in PC Gamer in the 90's. The forums are still around, barely, but I don't visit often.

Chud until Devin left. I didn't particularly like Devin but the site went downhill.

Started here in 2006.

 

[Timeaisis]

The RPGMaker community was a huge part of my life as a teenager. It has died and been revived countless times in the form of thousands and thousands of websites over the years, but the original community I knew and loved all those years ago is long gone.

 

[Deleted member 17706]

EverQuest.

There was nothing like it when it came out. A whole new frontier.

I was glad to be there before MMOs got so homogenized.

The forum aspect of it was amazing. Setting up raid schedules. Sharing maps and secrets and tips.

Glorious.

Yep, yep. By extension, the Fires of Heaven guild's forums really got built up as the main forums for discussion about the game, but have since died out. Some of the community got together to create a new forum called rerolled, but it's not nearly as thriving, obviously.

 

[Hankodank]

The most prolific one was probably mp3.com, which was basically the Soundcloud equivalent in its heyday of 1998-2000. That all but evaporated as the service gradually shifted towards catering to big labels rather than independant musicians.

I'll have to dig it up, but I still have my mp3.com bag that I received for creating a profile and uploading some of my compositions...

 

[Elandyll]

Anyone remember Allakhazam and Vault, the go-to places for the early MMORPGs like EQ, Ashron's Call, DAOC or the infamous Horizons, Empires of Istaria?

 

[Mango Positive]

Gametrailers in the mid aughts. I got out long before the site shutdown, but that place was toxic.

I'm also a mod over on a Phish site that I've been a member of since 2005, and that site is basically a ghost town these days. Been a while since I've even logged in. Don't get me wrong, the Phish community on the internet is very much alive and well, but that site is not what it once was.

Phishhook? That's one I post on from time to time, but to say it's in decline is an understatement.

 

[phisheep]

What went wrong with LessWrong?

Not asking to disagree with you or anything like that. I'm just sort of aware of the community and curious.

Got too narcissistic and up itself and all the good posters vanished elsewhere. Many of them now hanging around on Scott Alexanders blog. Some on Reddit.

 

[sphagnum]

Corona's Coming Attractions.

 

[>:)]

Planetquake.com comes to mind...actually any Quake forum at it's absolute peak. Back when mods were 1000x better than the main game itself.

 

[Man Called Aerodynamics]

Used to be part of a lot of dedicated fansites for various rock bands. Do band fansites even exist anymore?

 

[LucidMomentum]

Does PurePwnage count?

When they were still uploading videos regularly before the TV deal, I was a mod for the console section and by default the off-topic and crap sections too.

I loved that place in junior high and the first couple years of high school - I remember playing Brawl with people (with horrible lag), staying up late to play with European fans, and doing my best to make hype threads for the Wii and DS since they were my consoles of choice at the time.

Then around my junior year of high school I couldn't keep up my workload and modding duties, and I started to turn into a kind of jerk mod so I stepped down.

Haven't checked it out since, but hearing that the movie is out brought back fond memories.

Not sure how active it is nowadays, seems like it fell by the wayside when YouTube took off and such.

 

[TheCochese]

Cheapassgamer.com

Used to be super active in all the forum areas, great place to discuss games, liked it even better than here as I prefer having console specific forums to one catch all gaming forum.

It just slowly died off over the past 3 years or so. The deals forum is a cesspool just as bad as slickdeals, and there's barely in activity in gaming forums with just a handful of posts in many of them.

This.

 

[Whales]

a smash bros brawl clan back in the day when they were super popular

joined it about 10 years ago

we used to have 40-50 members in our chat at peak times, now we're pretty much only 6-7 left that still come on just to chat and play games together. Its pretty cool to realize I was only a kid/teenager when I joined with these guys, and now we're all adults and still friends

 

[radios shipping overview]

The most prolific one was probably mp3.com, which was basically the Soundcloud equivalent in its heyday of 1998-2000. That all but evaporated as the service gradually shifted towards catering to big labels rather than independant musicians.

Seems like Soundcloud itself is pursuing the same path at this point.

 

[The_Dama]

IGN forums
Vine
Digg
PalTalk

 

[Captain Pants]

I was a moderator on Gamespot's GGD forum for a good five or six years. We tried to knock down spammers and keep discussions focused on current game news and releases, as that's what the community had always been. The old community manager left and the new one basically told us to only deal with spammers and to not worry about content anymore. It was all downhill from there. It went from a place where you could sit back and discuss your love of games with a tight-knit group to a trolled up system wars hell hole. Most of us left after that.

 

[daveo42]

Maybe this is more a personal death, but FFXI during the days of its economic woes. To me it felt like the community died as the economy balooned out of control. The fun I had playing left and all that remained was bitterness and rivalries between linkshells and RMT over spawn claims and rare drops.

Happy to see the game recover, but I could never go back.

 

[Pau]

Yes, but the place grew to be so toxic and ended up being run by a stalker so I won't even mention it's name.

 

[MagnaderAlpha]

Final Fantasy Online. Used to be my number 1 forum I'd frequent.. then main site stopped being updated and the forums slowly died out.

While I know it's not dead, I used to also frequent Gamefaqs message boards too. Those ones(per individual game), in particular, tend to live, thrive and die by each game's shelf-life, where the boom tends to focus around the pre-release of a game and about a year after release, then slowly tapers off into a few loyalists that try to keep the boards alive.

I also remember loving the West Mansion forums(Splatterhouse related). The owner of the site had health problems, so he couldn't always update the main site or moderate the message board. He eventually just left it open and every few months you see someone reaching out to someone else with reply or new thread.

The Final Fantasy Online Forum was the first one I ever posted on. I was probably in 7th or 8th grade. No clue what its status is now.

It became Final Fantasy Society, a shell of it's former existence and never as great as FFO was during it's booming years.

 

[CoryCubed]

This one is a little sad to me because I joined the site back in high school I think. Things moved pretty slowly but at a speed that was easy to keep up with. Eventually I joined GAF and that was that. Probably posted a few more times at CAG in one of the threads that were like a community thread. Don't even lurk anymore. If I was in the States again though I would drop by the weekly deals threads. Those are key.

Amazing. 11 years ago I worked at Blockbuster, running one of the Game Rush sides. Used to run one of the threads. Well I posted some deals on CAG and got put under investigation, went two weeks no word so I found another job. I most likely would have sunk with the Blockbuster ship had CAG not existed.

 

[Lotto]

rip

 

[Zakalwe]

Guild Wars Guru - was a mod there for a few years. Retired when I quit the game.

nmaps.net and the metanet forums - admin/mod there for a few years too - community surrounding the game 'n - way of the ninja' on PC. Map builders, mostly, but a decent community of people some of whom I'm still friends with.

Both communities started small, grew and became very active, and slowly fizzled out. They're both still going, but nowhere near the same capacity.

 

[Paracelsus]

Yes, the italian branch of gamesradar forums, biggest italian gaming forum. It had already slowed down during gen 7, but the fatal blow was when it was sold to an alleged scumbag, the editing staff was fired and outsourced to death, so aficionados (after years and years of empty threats) just upped and left.

 

[r4z4]

I really miss City of Heroes.
My first ever MMO and still my favourite.

Me too - good times. Fire/Kin Controllers FTW!

 

[Isak_Borg]

Dreamless.

 

[Einchy]

Tagmonkey

It was a signature making forum with a ton of amazing artists. After a while, though, most people gave up on making signatures or digital art and the forum just became a forum for people to shoot the shit about stuff. Most of the admins gave up on running the website, it was passed down to other members and then at some point it changed its name to Robomonkey after a beloved member that passed away.

The website is still going on but it's mostly, like, 30 or so people posting on it and I haven't posted there in probably 4 or so years.

Also Bleachportal.net, 2Fort2Furious, AnimeRenders and many more.

 

[dity]

I was on an active community called "Customize PSP" about a decade ago. Went from a regular member to a moderator when I was there. It was mostly focused on PSP customisation through custom firmware, although it was mostly off-topic discussion. The site died when the PSP scene died, and now I think it's just a relic sub-forum of a newer (but also dead) forum.

On the forum people would share the latest CFW, hardware hacks, rumours, and pictures of their custom XMB theme. I remember shit like "disable the UMD drive to get 30GB of extra storage with this hack" and other silly rumour nonsense. And the constant "ugh, Sony updated the PSP and we can't play this game until CFW catches up".

 

[Psykoboy2]

INN - The Imagination Network

Prodigy (P*) - mainly the chatrooms

AOL - The Chatrooms

LiveJournal





MySpace

 

[zephervack]

The one that hurts the most is UnderGround gamer, it was a Torrent site focused on Retro Gaming, its legality was questionable of course but they had a lot of unreleased stuff, old dev-kits documentation/software, manual scans, Soundtracks, magazines etc

It was fascinating from a preservation point of view, they had rules to not share anything that was still on sale but that didnt stop who ever sued them from making them disappear.

 

[John Kowalski]

No, all the communities i was once or still am a part of are still going strong. Though they aren't many, i'm very picky about these things.

Consider yourself lucky neogaf.

 

[TaterTots]

Gamepro.

 

[Nyoro SF]

The one that immediately comes to mind was the fansubbing and scanlation IRC communities I used to participate in.

Pretty much every group that I knew of at the time has disappeared.
Some groups small (IRC: 20-40 members) and big (2000+ members).
The amount of drama, excitement, boredom and childishness on display was astronomical. I talked to pretty much every kind of person possible personality-wise. Great times.

I'm not as invested in those communities at all anymore but it wouldn't surprise me if there are still big IRC groups out there for those communities. I was purely talking about the ones I used to be part of. Though I just noticed GG is back...

 

[AlimNassor]

in the early 2000s a bunch of people from the RPG forum of gamefaqs took over one of the user level-restricted boards. A bunch of us still keep up with one another and play games regularly, but hardly anyone posts there anymore. Gamefaqs in general kind of dropped off sharply after the site was sold off.

I'd say under Sballens watch Gfaqs has grown much better. CjayC was a terrible at managing the community or running the site.. Problem is it's dated now. The rise of youtube killed Gfaqs.

 

[The Albatross]

INN - The Imagination Network

Prodigy (P*) - mainly the chatrooms

AOL - The Chatrooms

LiveJournal





MySpace

Prodigy "Classic" user here. Used to go to the chat rooms as well, but mostly stuck to the videogame and pro wrestling boards. This would have been back in.. 1995/1996 maybe.