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?
This prompted me to look for mine and incredibly it’s still online and essentially unchanged.
https://www.otaku-attitude.net/
But it has had barely any activity since 2022. But I’m surprised it survived this long.
The feels, man
Similar feelings for a few communities that have existed since 2000. The posts are all there, but the people are all gone.
RIP Abandonia my beloved
Anyone
Sad mp3 syncing noises
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
There was this forum I used for a decade. It was a support group for a few specific related medical conditions (I will lie if you ask. It was the fatal butt disease. The condition isn’t the important part), and after a couple years as a user they made me moderator over a small subforum (like fifteen of us were in the smaller group) for a medical research group. They were some of the closest friends I’ve ever made.
I’m the only person still alive in the research group (benefits of getting sick young I guess) and the last time I checked the forum, the latest post was ten months old. I owe them confidentiality, but with día de los muertos coming up I find my mind lingering on them more than usual.
In an interesting perspective, We’re experiencing the first wave of collective library being attacked and distorted by ai. A collective history of digital art and entertainment throughout 5 decades or more.
Will we collectively preserve it or just join the ai wave?
Ironically, even current nostalgic trend is triggered by ai too.
Also would be funny if after all this is gone, there is only this last obelisk standing somewhere in the desert with dickbutt on it.
it was never preserved and never was going to be preserved.
all of history is curation, most everything that was ‘created’ is lost, because it’s not significant or relevant.
gamefaqs walkthroughs
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.
I’ve been keeping a list of interesting niche websites I’ve found since around 2018, and it’s been sad seeing them gradually go offline and disappear into the void.
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.
Anyone remember BIGmog?
It was unfortunate watching our forum die. It was a pretty busy space, lots of gaming info, participation and all that. The main damage was caused by our preferred game series studio killing private servers and mods with the next version of the game in favor of dev company paid servers with limitied and company approved mods. Pretty soon the seconday games we played followed suit. That caused a lot of the group to look for other games to play, modding was what we were all about. The forums were a lot of fun. A lot of people learning how to use the graphical tools for games and personlize their forum presence. I just looked at the wayback machine and it was a real blast from the past seeing all the names, all the servers, the activity…it was a good 5-8 years of my life.
