nice forums on the internet - General Discussion

in recent times, i've found myself taking a step back from the absolute chaos of modern social media. i think its obvious to everyone who can think critically that its an absolute mess. in my recent experience its one big insane hell loop of doomposting and brain melting content, just shit that's algorithmically designed to keep you on the site and clicking. its gotten to the point where i've seen videos overlayed with fucking subway surfer gameplay to keep people attentive - the fact that this is a trend is hilarious and disturbing.

in lieu of this, i've been revisiting means of communication that i largely but not entirely missed out on in my teens, due to my use of social media growing up. shit like forums, irc channels, exploring various webrings, other misc. communities, etc. that brings me here; i've been part of smwc for a while (nearly 8 years?) and i've met so many friends here largely on discord, but the forums have quieted down significantly as people move onto the latter platform en mass (and i dont blame them - discord is well supported as a messaging platform, but its no replacement for something as accessible as this forum and related services hosted here). so, what are your guys' favorite places on the internet? anyone feeling the same things i am?

a few places i like to visit;

knockout.chat - spiritual successor to the facepunch forums (rip)
teamfortress.tv - comp tf2 forum. i dont even play comp but im an avid viewer of the na scene, very interesting game to watch and analyze :o

discuss

also been a while since i've interacted with anyone here so long time no see smwc o/

Website

Well, there aren't that many forums I'm on these days besides SMWCentral, but there is one I've been on for over 20 years. It's a forum called The PokeMasters, which mainly focuses on you guessed it, Pokemon (I have the same username there as I have here). Even though many of its sub-forums are dead or dying (it's a sad fate for this forum, which came out in 2000. I ironically made my account there in August of that year), there is still some life there. I also happen to be a moderator there in their Games, Games, Games forum, which is basically their equivalent of SMWCentral's Forum Games area (when I learned it was in need of a new mod to succeed the lone inactive mod, I offered to help out and I subsequently became its new mod nearly 3 years ago, plus it's the area I'm most active at there). Although I also mod a sub-area of their Games, Games, Games forum, that sub-area is sadly one of the dead areas of the forum (it was a place for virtual Pokemon that were either adopted or captured, which are separate tiers. It also had places where you could write stories involving Pokemon battles to earn one of two types of currency, a place to earn mystery gifts (random items) and play some games for a third kind of currency exclusively for this place, two reward shops where you could buy mostly technical machines (aka TMs) and various held items for your adopted or captured Pokemon, and a battling facility where people in the sub-area could battle each other in a battle of adopted Pokemon or captured Pokemon, although it never allowed an adopted Pokemon to battle a captured Pokemon due to the separate tiers).

So yeah Steven, I definitely know 100% what it's like for a forum to quiet down and get a decrease in activity over the years. It's pretty much an unavoidable reality when real life consumes more and more of a forum member's time (we were lucky to get help from the webmaster when spambots took over the forum. Fortunately, that problem was taken care of, and he even installed a captcha (on my suggestion, I might add) to stop spambots from registering. It has stopped nearly 4,500 of them from registering).

Malinda Kathleen Reese's Discord server is easily the nicest Internet community that I've ever been part of, though it's not a forum. I mostly had a good time with the Magic Set Editor forums and Discord as well until I committed a social faux pas. Gosh, though, I guess I don't really visit many actual forums these days other than this one, and even then not as frequently as I used to.

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I'm working on a hack! Check it out here.

This is pretty much the only online forum I frequent due to the like-mindedness of the userbase to something that I hold dear to my heart. I used to be on raocow's Talkhaus semi-regularly but I'm not super into his new content so I don't follow his most active (let's play) thread anymore.
Even if SMWCentral has lost a significant amount of people to discord, you can't capture the charm of interacting through an online forum. It's just different.

---> Magic: The Gathering Legends <---

Originally posted by VinylHeart

Even if SMWCentral has lost a significant amount of people to discord, you can't capture the charm of interacting through an online forum. It's just different.

totally agree.

i completely forgot that talkhaus existed... i dont watch raocow too often though. ill give it a visit

Website

Here's a few forums I frequent

Jul - A forum (with a Discord server) that's been around since around 2007-ish. While it is home to the official sub-forum for TCRF and used to have a large focus on ROM hacking, it's evolved into a sort of misc. general forum that serves as a sort of retreat. Definitely my favorite place to hang out.
Kafuka Boards - Another forum I sometimes browse. It's been a bit slow lately though, and I haven't been super active there for a while either.
Kuribo64 - I'm not super active here, and it's also been a bit slow here, but this is another ROM hacking-centered board

this is the only place i visit, and not super regularly (unless i just posted some smw music stuff). the places i used to be semi-active on in my mid-teens either don't exist anymore (rvlution) or have turned into borderline ghost towns (kuribo64). i genuinely can't remember if i made an account on talkhaus, but i never had much of a reason to investigate it beyond a small amount of lurking since i was never into raocow lol

also i grew way too attached to acmlmboard-style forum software (think old smwc, kafuka/jul, nsmbhd), so places like rhdn and smbx feel really off to navigate. the design of acmlmboard and its derivatives is so timeless and intuitive that stuff like phpbb ends up feeling gross to me, and i never found any of the communities or their topics compelling enough to invest in like i did smwc

c3 winter 2021 | music stuff | youtube