Can you help me build a list of established 10+ year old, stable, web forum communities?
So far I have
… and obvously our alma mater right here.
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!
…and Planet Crap :)
F13, I think they’ve been around for 10 years.
http://www.fohguild.org/forums/ fires of heaven (eq guild, now for general mmo talk)
http://www.smashboards.com/ smash bros forum, started in 2000
http://ocremix.org/forums/ video game remix community. userid #1 joined in 1999
I’m not sure exactly when they started, but the forums at theforce.net have some posts going back to at least 2002.
No love for slashdot?
F13 looks pretty small based on the topic count, far lower than I would expect for a 10 year old forum
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.
Talked about on the latest tested podcast: http://www.therpf.com
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.
Good starting point that lists a whole bunch going back that far: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_forums
Neogaf goes back to 2000?
Is it just me, or does planetcrap have no rules/faq of any kind whatsoever that I can find?
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.
Not sure what you mean by overtly commercial. Egullet is actually run by a non-profit.
Slashdot, Anandtech, Chowhound, and Hardocp have been around since 1997, egullet was 2001, and neowin 2000.
GamerswithJobs.
Depending on how you want to count, the same forum community has existed at gonegold.com and now octopusoverlords.com for more than 10 years.
I’ve been a member over at HomeTheaterForum.com since the late 90s, though I hardly ever post over there anymore.
What’s with these newfangled forums you kids have? Let’s talk Usenet!