This week Radio Discussions, a long lasting message board about broadcasting, folded up shop. It was a great place for people interested in the history and background of TV and radio. What message or websites, now gone from the internet, do you miss and wish you could still access?
The heyday of Fidonet was something special.
A number of Usenet groups, including alt.fan.heinlein before Eternal September and alt.fan.cecil-adams before it turned sour and bitchy.
Can’t think of too many web-era boards that are gone and missed.
Entertainment Weekly used to have a pretty lively one until it was shut down. In fact, I believe a poster left a link for this message board there and I followed it.
Fametracker’s board was also good but it got to be too much for the site’s web masters to handle so it was shut down. Fametracker itself followed soon after so its creators could devote more time to Television Without Pity.
Back around 2000 or so, I frequented FFonline.com, which was a genuinely good Final Fantasy fan website. Reasonably smart and well-informed discussions about the games, including heads ups from those who had played the Japanese versions before they came out in the US.
I think it is totally gone now; it was a Malware/Spyware haven for awhile, too.
I loved Fametracker (omg, the last days the mods just gave up on the celebrity gossip boards, don’t think I ever laughed so hard in my life), but I think I tracked down the same people, carrying on with celebrity snark and gossip, now at Crown Princess Marie Chantal of Greece.
One of the best ever “Dumb Waste of Time” websites was whatsbetter.com:
The site had a library of probably hundreds of thousands of photos (I think users could submit photos as well). Two photos would appear side by side and you had to click on which was better- NOT which photo was better, but the concepts that the photos represented.
You might get photos representing: “Hugs” / “Chocolate Chip Cookies”
You click on either one or the other then it would refresh for two new photos.
The question “What’s Better?” appeared over each pairing. Somtimes you’d wish the question were “What’s Not Quite as Bad as the Other?” but you’d still be forced to click on one as being “Better”.
There were filters that you could personalize. The default setting kept everything either pleasant or innocuous but you could open up the filter to allow some very unpleasant choices.
Even with open filters, sometimes the choice was easy:
What’s Better: “Fluffy Bunnies” / “The Holocaust”
But you could get something like:
What’s Better: “Bataan Death March” / “Katyn Massacre”
And you wouldn’t get a new pairing until you chose which one was “better”.
You could also open the filters to allow porn. You could bet choices like:
What’s Better: “Cotton Candy” / “Anal Sex”
With graphic depictions of each.
Once they got some widespread attention, the took out all the porn and horrific images. Not long after that, the site died a quiet death.
Hampster Dance
I miss the heyday of rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan on usenet. It provided good discussion of the books and some great discussion of current events. It was my SDMB before I found the SDMB.
harrypotterfans.net was my favorite site as a small Potter fan.
Moved Cafe Society --> IMHO.
[nonmod]Another Fametracker fan here – that was actually my main pre-Dope MB.[/nonmod]
Overgrow. I was involved with the forums (under a different name).
I spent a lot of time on the IGN.com boards when I was younger.
Also Ipecac Records had an active forum before it was shut down too.
Throttleyard was a great motorcycle site affiliated with Bring a Trailer. Unusual and antique bikes abounded. Then suddenly it was gone.
alt.callahans was a fun place there for awhile. It was the first place I used this screen name, in fact. Buy my heart belongs to the Buffy board that introduced me to my wife.