Time to buy out the domain
I went back looking for mine to make sure the shit I said back then was good and deleted. “Site can’t be reached” Thank god!
Now I just need to go burn down the internet archive!
I’m sure this already exists but someone should make a forum aggregator. Read only with an open standard and make an account to join the discussion on the site. Basically just a fancy rss feed.
Creating a healthy new community takes a huge amount of activation energy or an incredibly long time. Why not just transplant the mature communities to more fertile ground? Bonus: it’s much harder to astroturf an entire forum than a few high visibility accounts.
I’m sure some forums wouldn’t want the extra traffic with no ad revenue. But discoverability would be a huge boost now that search engines are trying to be a black box Ai MitM. Anything other angle I’m missing?
I am grateful that phwonline.com got a solid eulogy
Shame that Facepunch forums are gone
Glad we’ve always got Archive.org
Lets see what happend to gamespy
everynow and then, I log back in to GaiaOnline ( go-gaia if you’re OG GD prommie)… see how it’s doing…
Would you recommend it?
not really. It’s a shadow of itself at this point. The most noteworthy thing about it is the trivia knowledge that it sparked many research papers as a model of hyperinflation. But the forums themselves are dead. The minigames were entertaining at their inception, in the days of Shockwave games… but nowdays… you’d be more entertained just pulling down Terraria or something
I could go, but… Would I dare gaze upon the visage of my most teenage self?
If you don’t cringe you haven’t improved. I have to chant that when I look at anything I wrote when I was younger.
do it, coward
I used post on a mobile phone forum called Lasyk, this was some time in 2004-2006…
The forum is long since dead and erased, but it was a huge forum with 100k members, subforums for just about any mobile phone made by mainstream manufacturers.
I remember managing to create a huge thread over on their misc forum, where I asked other users to post a screenshot of their desktop.
It just kept going, and I think it became a staple thread with 80-100 pages or so…
I typed in a random string of words in the early days and added “.com”, and I ended up on some forum some random guy in Texas hosted for him and his friends. I was obviously a decade younger than everyone else, but it was the best of the internet. We knew each other by name, the link sharing was top notch, civil conversations, no one was making money off of it.
Checked it recently and it’s been down for a long time. The internet archive caught one snapshot of it in time. I can see my username on the homepage like looking at my own gravestone.
how did people in the 2000s afford web servers and domains ?
it seemed like everyone had their own site, my idiot child mind thought that it must be free
it was free. Geocities was free. Domains were (still are mostly) cheap. For simple web hostings there were (and still are) lots of free options
Now you could host a website on a pi zero if you wanted to. Well, you could if you make a proper website and don’t just download every JS library you can find to add a button.
if I ever make a website again, it will still static with manually coded html. I don’t know js, I can only remember some css. Maybe I’ll put some spinning 3d buttons gifs for fun.
I have used PHP as well for some but mostly stuff like display all the PNGs in this folder on this page. So that changing images in future if they provide updated ones is really easy. They usually loved that idea but most would rarely provided any. But for me it was fun to learn some PHP.
The rest was HTML/CSS. Maybe a very tiny bit of JS.
Domains are cheap but I swear they have the most fuck-ass interpretation of inflation out of any product. My $3CAD .live domain is now nearly $50CAD/yr. Still cheap but why
My .house was 35usd first two years, now is like 60usd
And having some web space is not that expensive either. I am not even close to using the cheapest options, but it costs me about 80€/year to run the space I use for my small hobby forum (I will not doxx myself), and some other things. Depending on what your income, and other hobbies are, that is peanuts.
Not free, but not expensive either.
they cost like 10-20 bucks a month to run. i used to run a hosted website and it was like 5 bucks a month.
It wasn’t that expensive if you used shared hosting.
old forums i use are still around and active.
the users are all like 50-60 though. nobody under 50 uses them and nobody under 30 even knows what a ‘internet forum’ is.
We are on a modern Internet forum right now though. It just works a little differently.
reddit style stuff was never a forum. it’s a link aggregator that had a discussion on top.
forum structure is way more specialized and it’s not threaded, because each post is it’s own thread.
gamefaqs walkthroughs
Every few years I check in on an old message board I was active on between like 1999-2010. It’s still there. Gets maybe 1-2 posts per year these days.
Those years line up well with SETI@home?
Same for me, mine is https://skyscrapercity.com/ Still going strong, surprisingly!
Although looks like they’ve migrated from PhpBB to ‘fora’?
I don’t remember them ever using phpBB? Need to check the Wayback Machine later
Did you use to visit too?
I discovered that site in 2009 or so, but don’t remember opening an account or regularly following it, though I did occasionally find links to it elsewhere.
I’ve meanwhile checked and it seems they used to use vBulletin, not phpBB.
When I think about those old forum friends, the ones I’ve lost touch with (or worse, just lost), I like to listen to this song. also singshouting I’m doing this for revenge with 3,000 other people is one hell of an experience
RIP Abandonia my beloved
I’ve documented exploits like you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships that clip through space in Masters of Orion. I watched the six hidden cutscenes in Baldur’s Gate. All those moments will be lost in time…
Time to die.
I used to be much more of a hardcore archivist. Nowadays I’m glad some of my most prolific years’ output is just gone, never to be seen again.
Wait, hidden cutscenes in Baldur’s Gate?
I’m just riffing off the original lines.
