www.birdboard.com is good for bird owners. The moderators tend to be self-important and domineering, but it’s a great way to learn about all kinds of pet birds and behaviours.
Eng-Tips is a great place for technical engineering subjects.
The forums at Mtbr are good for everything about mountain bikes and riding.
Maybe a little more narrow than the others already posted, but for SCUBA diving, I’ve been going to Scubadiving.com’s message board for years. It’s not quite as newbie-friendy, or as active, as it once was, mostly due to a format change, but there are still some extremely knowledgeable, helpful people that hang out there.
BrewBoard for homebrewing enthusiasts. Affiliated with Homebrew.com where you can get mail order equipment and ingredients.
For handguns, rifles, and all things that go bang:
J.
I’ve bounced around a couple watch-related boards looking for a good one. No luck yet, but if any mechanical watch (pocket preferably) enthusiasts know of one I’d love to hear about it.
Here’s the aptly named Smith & Wesson forum http://smith-wessonforum.com/
The 1911 site is kind of rambling, but still interesting http://forum.m1911.org/
And the AR-15 one has a lot of good stuff, I never post there but I built a rifle from the ground up based on the info I got from them.
A bit of self-promotion: I run a fairly busy urban planning-related message board called the Cyburbia Forums.
My only extremely specific board. If you are thinking of buying or would like to inform yourself about any aspect of modern high-tech diesel engines then this is the place. The diesel heads there are super friendly and in love with the tech. I even met a guy there once who let me park my car at his house while i went to europe for two weeks.
For etymology, I frequent Wordorigins , and if any of us is interested in Vintage hand tools, visit Tool Talk
Kingsnake is the best site for learning how to care for any sort of reptile, and lots of invertebrates too.
The Rats Rule forums are the best for pet rat care.
Knitty has awesome forums on knitting, spinning, and yarn.
Craftster is pretty much great for anything and everything craft.
For sound recording tips, tricks and explanations of functions and settings of Cool Edit Pro and Adobe Audition (prior to 2.0): I came in to tell you about the Syntrillium Forums that were archived at audiomasters.org, but I found out just now that that website no longer exists. It’s merely a placeholder with ad links. Sad. There was a wealth of discussion and information there, from when Syntrillium was a going concern. A portion of its information, which I suppose represents the best of the previous discussions, is archived at adobe.com as a continuously updated, but read-only FAQ section. It could be considered a primer for how to proceed with Audition 2.0. Learn how the old functions worked and then discover how they’ve improved them on the 2.0 users’ forum.
In addition, adobe hosts user-to-user fora for just about every one of their products - audio, video, web design, you name it.
For all aspects of Poker, Two Plus Two forums.
For Television in general, Digital Spy.
For Quiz TV (of the play-from-home variety), Quiz Telly.
For anything to do with Money, including getting a good deal on anything from bank accounts to holidays, Martin Lewis’ MoneySavingExpert.
All of these apart from the first one are UK-centric.
For a variety of Earth-related topics, everything from volcanoes and earthquakes to groundwater, petroleum and paleontology, both inside and out of the confines of US borders, The United States Geological Survey (USGS) site provides an excellent array of articles, maps, monitors, links, etc.
Hey! I found the audiomasters forum! The entire Syntrillium forums archive, plus a new message board is at audiomastersforum.net. So anyone who is interested in years’ worth of older information, plus new discussions of sound recording in Audition 2.0, this is the place to go. I’ve got it bookmarked now. I’ve got lots of reading to do!
That’s what I came in to post…
Heh. Way to go…trying to shoo away our members…gosh!
is by far the best community for any and all creative media production, enormous user forums, a seperate board for each kind of software software. and the mods post killer webbased and video tutorials online.