Who am I missing? Large forums first, please, ideally something we’d have heard of at least in passing somewhere on the web. Better still, ones you still use and participate on.
Remember, they must be at least 10 years old! The Internet Wayback Machine will be watching!
Talked about on the latest tested podcast: http://www.therpf.com Adam Savage mentions he’s been lurking for 10+ years, though the archives don’t go back that far and it’s not indexed on wayback.
Adam Savage mentions he’s been lurking there since 1999, though the archives don’t go nearly that far, and it’s not indexed by Wayback. This is probably true of many forums – they just wipe the archives at some point.
F13 is a small insular extremely hostile community, yeah. That’s not an insult, they take pride in it. I post there myself on occasion. They are the only really active remaining fragment of the LtM diaspora.
As for other 10+ year old forums, there’s hardocp, fatwallet, anndtech, neowin, slashdot as someone already mentioned, egullet.com, chowhound… there are quite a few. 10 years isn’t that long. Now if you extend it to 15 years, you start to get to the birth of the internet as a mass medium, and those are more sparse.
I’m not as enthused about the ones that are kind of overtly commercial, but community grows up around stuff.
Now if you extend it to 15 years, you start to get to the birth of the internet as a mass medium, and those are more sparse.
Fine, so go for the brass ring and name some of those. 2002 is roughly when broadband Internet became a think for a reasonably large number of folks, and most people had switched over to web browsers and web forums rather than USENET readers or what have you.