snopes. There are several of us here who are refugees from the death of the snopes boards (which we were told would be migrating to Discourse, but which were killed instead without warning.) There are some other posters here who left the snopes boards while they were still alive.
Do Usenet groups count as boards?
I’ve forgotten the name. It was the tv show board. I followed and posted about Top Chef and other shows I watched.
The moderation there was very,very strict and they lost a lot members.
Probably Television Without Pity. I was banned from TWoP without warning, and with no understanding of what I did wrong. Compare that to 23 years here without 1 warning.
I was a member of The Bronze, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer boards, first on the original UTV board in 1997, the year BtVS premiered, then the official WB , then UPN message boards. I have been StGermain in all my incarnations.
StG
Yes, TWoP. I couldn’t think of the name. They ran a lot of people off.
There were some very active groups. I remember watching Top Chef in 2012. There would be a 100 posts about that weeks episode a hour later.
In the mid-late 90’s there was a DirecTV card hacking site. I think they finally got sued (or threat of) after the DMCA (I see that happened in 1998). That was good times. Hackers would crack the card to get everything and then DirecTV would send out an ECM (electronic counter measure) which would brick the card and then the hackers would figure out how to get around that. Rinse… Repeat.
I was on Usenet a lot for about a decade in the 80s - 90s.
I too used to post on the snopes board quite regularly.
Before it was unceremoniously shut down, it seemed like there was a period of probably a few years where the board was just sort of left to rot. The board was still up and existing users could still log in and post, but there was no admin, not moderators, and no new members could join. So the community slowly shrank as people left but no new people could join. I got in the habit of reading all the threads, because towards the end it was slow enough that you could do that.
“First was Compuserve back in the the late 1980s, accessed it via a VT220 plugged into a modem .”
And the DEC forum in CompuServe was very helpful. I can’t remember the name of the guy who responded to all the technical questions, but he helped me immensely.
Kinda sounds like The Skeptics Guide to the Universe boards, but they are still up and going.
What he said.
Back To The OP
I was on a clown forum for a while. It just never grabbed me. I also felt, strongly, that while not actively discriminating the members, mods and admins were operating from a very blinkered worldview. It was just assumed that all members were white, American and Christian. I just Googled and they aren’t around anymore. I don’t really miss that board.
And there were also plenty of gag reviews. The most popular ones that I remember were the Three Wolf Moon t-shirts, a certain horse mask, Veet for Men, and more recently a laxative that looks like Gummy Bears. Another was a self-published book that briefly became a best-seller for all the wrong reasons after Stephen Colbert mentioned it on his show, titled “My Parents Open Carry.” My favorite “comment” said “My black parents open carried until the police shot them 146 times.” .
That sounds like Television Without Pity. Never posted there, but I sure heard about it.
Websleuths, a true-crime board, is also heavily moderated, although for obvious reasons.
Another board I used to participate in was NITCENTRAL’S BULLETIN BRASH REFLECTIONS. It was a message board devoted to Star Trek that was created by author of The Nitpicker’s Guide Series of Star Trek books.
It is still up here but it mostly looks defunct with people ONLY sporadically: Nitcentral's Bulletin Brash Reflections
actually, when i wandered off the dope I started posting on GameFAQs and on specific game boards that tend to be popular for a few months to a year then just drop dead …
The Fabulous Forums of Fathom.
{SIGH}
Some people will be missed.
Snopes still makes me want to use NSFBSK (not safe for British school kids) as a warning.
Plenty of Fish’s boards was always more engaging and rewarding than the people you’d meet off it IRL.
ehMac.ca—not quite defunct but pretty close. Any day now. A site for Canadian Mac users set up in the early 2000’s but now just a shell if its former self moderated by a couple of whack jobs. It was flourishing at one time with all kinds of discussion on a variety of topics including politics.
CoinWorld magazine used to have a message board. I was a pretty prolific poster over there for a while. I don’t remember what happened but the board went away for a bit and then started up again somewhere else but it wasn’t the same.
Before Amazon removed it, Stephanie Messenger’s book “Melanie’s Marvelous Measles” (about a young girl’s delightful encounter with a Friendly Virus) garnered hilarious reviews.
It’s been reviewed elsewhere, but to less comic effect.
Incidentally, I think the gummy candy’s marked laxative effective was unintentional, but spectacular.