What became of Una’s UnaBoard? I lurked there sporadically. I thought it was a lot like a mini-SDMB on a smaller scale. Has it gone by the wayside?
I mean I sub to Reddit - Dive into anything too… there are dozens of us (well 190k members of the subreddit at any rate)!
Thanks for that reddit link, I have certainly heard about it but I haven’t bothered to look it up. I’ll check it out. There is another fountain pen board that I have tried but I didn’t like it.
As ThelmaLou once said, this sounds like the ideal dating ground for me. 
I’ve joined and participated in internet-based discussion boards for decades, but like others here have noted, they seem to be dying out. I had gotten used to having to sign up and maintain many multiple accounts, yet perhaps younger users prefer the convenience of reddit. FWIW I use reddit only lightly; haven’t become a big user there.
It is really disappointing to go searching for a forum devoted to a specific activity, e.g. Subaru maintenance, and see a huge number of high quality posts all dated 10 years ago. Then, looking at the last 6 month’s worth of posts, all I see are questions being asked and nobody responding at all. Ghost town.
I also see Discord being mentioned as a modern place to hold discussions. So Discord and reddit…and maybe a few others…have taken over the lion’s share? It still feels like we’re missing something, and I am not sure where it’s being addressed.
Oh, and I choose not to use FB. Wifey does, and she gets good mileage out of it. Maybe I should see if FB can adequately tackle subjects like auto maintenance?
If anyone is interested on old Willys/Jeeps I can recommend thecj2apage.
One of the members here was instrumental in it’s inception. I would thank them publicly here & now, but I am not sure that they would want the praise/notoriety.
I still post a lot on the International Skeptics Forum, which is the sort-of spiritual successor to the James Randi Educational Foundation Forum where I really got my start. Membership and posting is down quite a lot from the old days, but you can still find an occasional good argument.
This is basically it. Message Boards haven’t died out, they’ve just become usurped by Reddit and Discord (though Discord is more of a chat app, but can be highly specified by topic).
Part of it is likely people who have gotten tired of doing all the IT work and maintainance and paying for boards and are happy bigger sites take care of all that thankless work.
reddit has a number of private subreddits that have general interest discussions, are well moderated and have a nice community of regulars. If you are prolific enough and not too abrasive, you’ll eventually get invited to a few of them. I enjoy reddit a lot.
There are basically only three for me: The SDMB, Giraffeboards, and the BattleTech forums.
I was a member of a handful of others, but like a seasonal creek in the Sahara, they all dried up.
I’m not a Snapchatter, or really into Reddit. I do enjoy the old-school style of the SDMB, and admittedly miss the “old-style” antique feel of the before the change. I wish there was a style to get the interface back to that old, VBulletin-style format while leaving the new functions in place.
Tripler
Old. Now get off my finely manicured MS-DOS based lawn.
I really miss the IMDB message boards. if you just watched a movie you could ask questions and discuss the plot and characters. there is nothing like it now. fucking Amazon. I feel like if they had charged an annual fee a lot of people would’ve paid to keep the board alive.
on the subject of quality of debate I’ve never found a board as good as SD though.
reddit is good too, but you have so many users you never develop any personal relationships with any of them like you do here, where the same 1000 or so people have been posting for twenty years. over here I recognize a lot of users by name, not so on reddit.
My bold.
What is/was the relationship between amazon and the IMDB message boards?
Amazon owns IMDB.
More to the point, IMDB was acquired by Amazon, and the boards existed prior to the acquisition. Now all that you have are reviews, so no back and forth at all.
//i\\
I was a frequent GameFAQs poster way back in the day. I probably haven’t posted there in over 15 years. Even then I felt like it was going downhill. I can’t imagine what the community is like these days. That forum actually spawned several spinoffs and I posted at one of those for several years as well.
When I used to play World of Warcraft, a few of the guilds I was with each had their own forum, some of which outlasted the guilds they were created for.
These days, all of the forums I visit apart from SDMB are highly specialized. My relative level of knowledge compared to most of the other forumgoers at these places is very low, so I generally just lurk (as I did here for a long time).
I used to participate in some homebrewing forums, which were mostly cool. But since my actual homebrewing exploded my gout I got away from homebrewing and the forums. It’s a shame, for I made some kick ass beer.
I also have spent considerable time at the city-data.com boards. It’s a mixed bag. You can get very detailed information about specific cities. But they have a politics board which is nuts. A lot of reactionaries post there.
Beyond that, I’ve spent lots of time on travel and aviation boards. Someone mentioned airliners.net, which is for the airplane geek. There’s also flyertalk.com, for frequent fliers and other people interested in the travel aspect of aviation. Then there’s the boards at TripAdvisor.com.
I consider reddit a message board and have found what I’d call communities in a number of smaller subreddits. They do need to stay small, though. Local neighborhood ones, smaller hobbies & collecting, oddly specific humor, etc. For instance, r/cannedsardines has been very entertaining lately as folks post details on what we now understand to be a huge diversity of canned seafood. I had no idea you could get canned razor clam or geoduck. A few participants do regular video reviews of canned fish and they’re great. You get to know these people.
@gdave, I read your addendum earlier today but it stayed on my mind. I reread it and last night’s exchange again tonight. I was actually double wrong and you have nothing to apologize for. I not only misread your post, through no error on your part, but then, I responded with a rude and snarky reply. That was wrong and I insist you retract your apologies. Or keep them in the apology bank for future credit.
And besides, if we can’t argue about message boards on a message board, why are we even message boarding?
For discussions of earlier editions of D&D I like the Dragonsfoot forum: Dragonsfoot - Index page
For RPG forums that are not subreddits, I like the RPGnet Forums: RPGnet Forums and En World: Forum list | EN World | Dungeons & Dragons | Tabletop Roleplaying Games
For guitar and gear talk I like: The Gear Page and http://www.gearslutz.com/board/
For electronic music creation and VST discussion, I like KVR: KVR Audio - Forum - VST Plug-in, AU, AAX, Audio Software Discussion
I check out the Ars Technica Open Forum sometimes for either specific advice or video gaming discussion: Ars OpenForum
For knife, sword and gadget collecting I like the BladeForums: https://www.bladeforums.com/
I would like to find a good gun forum, other than on reedit, that is not overrun by politics and is newb friendly.
For most other hobbies and interests, I think reddit is usually pretty decent.
I’ve mentioned my Ravelry membership, or at least alluded to it, quite a few times around here, and I do occasionally visit the Giraffe boards, where I have posted under a different username (and yes, I have seen what some of you have written about me over there).
Back in the 00s, I also much enjoyed Murmurs, a website by, for, and about R.E.M. fans that had a huge worldwide fanbase. After the band’s breakup and the webmaster having a growing family on top of a full time job, he took the site down when he couldn’t find anyone else to take it over. There were a couple other sites that some of us also visited, but they’re all gone too, one of them after the fake-teen pornographers started spamming it.
I also visit Reddit, and Websleuths, a true-crime site that unfortunately is too disorganized for my tastes to spend much time on it.