I enjoy the way forums work and how they’re laid out. I also love how useful they are, especially when so many companies are replacing their entire communities with a Discord channel, which is less than ideal. I only use a few forums, but I’d like to find some more to browse through, it doesn’t matter the topic!
My wee list:
- TIGSource Forums - Video game developers big and small post here, there’s even a section for showcasing work-in-progress projects which is really cool.
- The Metal Archives Forums - The main site is pretty much the gold standard for metal music cataloguing. The forums are obviously about the metal genre, too.
- Cook’d and Bomb’d - This is a comedy aficionado forum. It’s about all comedy, but it originally focused on the work of Chris Morris (Brass Eye, The Day Today).
EDIT: “Meal” to “metal” 🤦
The biggest Swedish forum on the internet, nutorious for having a very uncensored community (they are hosted in the US as Swedish law isn’t as permissive in terms of free speech, not by much, but enough to make it worth it), so you’ll have to ignore a shitload of racism, sexism, homophobia and more crap to read it.
The reason I read it is that they love discussing current events, if you notice something on the news, a shooting or other gang war stuff you will find a thread about it with the location of the incident, information about who lives there if it is a house or apartment building, this information includes names of possible people involved, their vehicles and countless racist/sexist/homophobic/classist/other remarks, I mainly just want the location so I know what area to avoid.
They also have the greatest Swedish forum thread in the history of the internet:
“Dumma saker ni gjort” - “Stupid things you have done”.
This is a thread that runs 131 pages, of glorious posts of Swedish teenagers in the early 2000s talking about stupid things that they have done. As a Swedish millenial who grew up in and around those years, everything is so amazingly familiar to me, making the thread increadibly funny.
I am not sure how well Google translate will work on the thread, becaue there is a LOT of sloppy spelling, which adds to the charm of the posts, but here is the link:
The Cartographer’s Guild. Although I have never actually posted there. I just stop by when I’m trying to draw a better map for my D&D games
Board Game Geek is cool, and Metal Archives is useful when I want to check that an interesting black metal band is not, in fact, a pack of nazis
Whirpool but it’s Australian focused
https://www.thelincolnforum.net/
It’s for maintaining and restoring classic Lincoln continentals. Lots of knowledge both in the content and in the members. You don’t find much outside of the forum.
Used to visit skyscrapercity.com
I still frequent XDA Forums for all of my custom ROM needs.
What was that app or site that brought a bunch of forums built on the same framework together?
I can’t say I “frequent” it, but if you ever have ANY troublesome A/V-related question/difficulty, there are absolute wizards of the exact sort you’re imagining lurking over in AVS Forum.
I enjoy http://tildes.net/ Old style, but with a modern design. You’ll see what I mean.
If you have a Gemini browser such as Lagrange, then gemini://bbs.geminispace.org is one of the better forums there.
Tildes is not an old school forum. It’s just a reddit clone. Nothing of age is bumped to the top.
It’s not a Reddit clone.
The post asks for old “style” forums. Not just forums that are actually old.
I believe old style means linear threads and other oldschool UI choices, not just look/aesthetics. That one has tree comment structure similar to all redditlikes, which (I believe) is relatively a recent invention? Have you seen comment trees like this few decades ago?
Lol, I remember tree style forums in the early 2000s.
Just because vBulletin/PHPbb/InvasionPowerBoard/punbb didn’t use them doesn’t mean it didn’t exist
The only tree structured texting thing from back then that I remember is mailing list conversations. If you remember any names of old forums like that, it would be interesting to research. Maybe there are still screenshots or archived pages of those.
Only one I frequent is a NSFW forum. Not sure if I should name it
Well now you have to
F95zone
I still find some good answers for questions on my car in some good old, car forums specific to whatever make you may have.
The Fantasy Grounds forum is for a virtual tabletop for TTRPGs that’s pretty active, and it’s been going through a lot of good UI updates lately since the guy from DnD Beyond joined.
That’s because the format itself promotes the accumulation of knowledge instead of the constant repetition from Reddit style forums which are better at generating new content.
