I nurtured my love for movies and home video at dvdfile.com, and a splinter board dvdinmypants.com. Pretty sure one or the other led me to the SDMB.
I was a big Dance Dance Revolution fan and found ddrmaniax.net, a community for software and custom songs for the PC based homebrew scene, where the Stepmania based Pump It Up began.
There was a nice FileMaker-centric one nicknamed “FileMaker Cafe” at filemakertoday.com, but the owner-manager kept moving it from one platform to another (for some of the same reasons we moved, I guess) but did it in such a way that any and all links to old posts ceased to work, and it dried up and died.
There was a vBulletin board for Eudora users at http://eudorabb.qualcomm.com/ for a long time.
The Macintosh macro program QuicKeys had a users’ forum at startly.com — gone now.
I was extremely active on the message boards for Wizards of the Coast (a game company, which makes Dungeons & Dragons, and Magic: the Gathering), from around 2000 until 2008 or so; I was even a moderator on their sub-board for the Role-Playing Gamers Association (RPGA) for a couple of years.
WotC is still around, but it looks like they killed the message boards at some point.
I was a participant in the Mighty Big TV/Television Without Pity message boards.
The IMDB message boards.
Too many Usenet groups–if they count. Also Yahoo Groups as well.
SDMB
…too soon?
The Microsoft Network, back in the Windows 95 beta days.
Kuro5hin, Consumerist, and, of course, UseNet, mostly in the scary devil monastery.
The earliest one I can remember was a message board tied to Square’s PlayOnline website during the early 2000s. Square is probably best known for their Final Fantasy series. Anyway, during this period they had a message board which generally revolved around their IPs. I was somewhat active there until the whole website was re-tooled to focus on their upcoming release of Final Fantasy XI MMO, and that message board went away.
Later on I spent a few years at one of the many GameFAQs spinoff boards and like many of them, it also went derelict.
Most recently, I was a regular visitor at The Ford Falcon News, which featured a forum devoted to that car (I own a '63 Falcon convertible). The forum went down a couple years ago, and the website appears to have gone down more recently.
I’ll say this about that last forum. It was probably one of the best sources of knowledge on Ford Falcons that could be found online. It going offline was a tremendous loss.
I participated in the forums over at Cigar Aficionado back in the early 2000s. It was a good group of posters, and very knowledgeable about all kinds of cigars from all kinds of places. And friendly too; I quite enjoyed meeting a few in real life. The forums were not moderated, but that wasn’t necessary; everybody got along quite well. We were all into the same hobby, after all.
Then, the forums were taken over by a bunch of people who were fans of Cuban cigars. I guess we all were, even the American posters, but these guys were big fans–such big fans that they didn’t want any discussion of anything other than Cuban cigars. For example, a friendly discussion of cigars from the Dominican Republic would be interrupted by these yahoos, telling us all we were idiots for actually liking such abominations. You can imagine the flamewars.
Moderation was needed, but wasn’t provided. Maybe about a dozen of us split off and formed our own message board, which an invitation was needed to join; and obviously, the obnoxious Cuban-first-and-only fans did not get invitations. Our board lasted maybe five or six years after that, before dying; and at some point after that, Cigar Aficionado’s boards became either so toxic or so unattended by new signups who saw the territory and wanted no part of it, that they were shut down.
In the 00s, I was an active participant in Murmurs.com, a website by, for, and about R.E.M. fans. It was my social media before we had social media. It was shut down after the band broke up, not just because of the breakup, but also because the webmaster had started a family and needed to devote more time to that and nobody else was willing to take it over.
Just a few weeks ago, he decided to shut down the Facebook page, and restart the website. Quite a few familiar usernames have come back, and it’s great to “see” everyone again.
I have also seen signs of people returning to message boards, which always were infinitely superior to social media, to me. We’ll see how it goes, and if it’s only the old fogies who come back for a bit.
Oh yes please! The only reason I go to social media is because it’s where the people all went. I hate the format and it breeds throwaway thoughtless posting.
There was a relatively small but lively board that I believe spun off the JREF boards. I’ve forgotten the name now, but it was basically run by one guy and then there was a massive loss of data and he didn’t have the desire or time to bring it back up.
There’s also a Norwegian skeptics board I was very active on, but that might still be around, I just lost interest at a point of low activity and low quality.
Back when Amazon had forums (ostensibly to discuss products), there were good times on the health forum. Lots of antivaxers and wooists of various persuasions, and a few regular folks with working brains.
In another brilliant move, Amazon did away with comments on product reviews, so now any dodo or competitor can trash a product and the seller can’t respond.
I was a rebel, Dotty… part of a group trying to get Macintoshes shoehorned into Corporate America, even if just to allow designers to do their job. Then, when I got asked to speak to a state-wide school board, that added “Sneaking Macs into Schools” as well.
After a day full of hearing “We’re a business. We will never use anything but Windows on IBM machines. Our employees can buy their own Macs to play with at home.” I’d be pretty worn down.
And one of my safe spots was the DealMac site (“How to go broke saving money”), and their excellent DealMac Forums.
They pulled the plug without much warning, though there was time for a number of the regulars to announce their move over to the MacResource Forums … they even have a subforum for ‘Friendly’ Political Ranting’. But I haven’t visited there in months…
… I’m too addicted to a more dopey forum.
.
eta: found the “We’re shutting down this forum” announcement, which was a week before the plug got yanked…felt shorter at the time (their official post starts with “A funny thing happened on our way to the forums: We killed them!”).
Just a little slice of history.
First was Compuserve back in the the late 1980s, accessed it via a VT220 plugged
into a modem .
Happy days.
As a 15-year old teenager, I fell in love with “Breakup Girl” because, let’s face it, relationships are what teenage girls talk about! So, I joined in 1998. I remember lying about my age and saying I was 25 because I was afraid nobody would take a 15-year old seriously.
I was a regular art macfixit until CNET took them over.
There is/was an antique automobile restoration board that I used to be active on. Before that there was IRC chat and prior to that I was on various BBS’s as well as running one of my own.