I enjoy the way forums work and how they’re laid out. I also love how useful they are, especially when so many companies are replacing their entire communities with a Discord channel, which is less than ideal. I only use a few forums, but I’d like to find some more to browse through, it doesn’t matter the topic!
My wee list:
- TIGSource Forums - Video game developers big and small post here, there’s even a section for showcasing work-in-progress projects which is really cool.
- The Metal Archives Forums - The main site is pretty much the gold standard for metal music cataloguing. The forums are obviously about the metal genre, too.
- Cook’d and Bomb’d - This is a comedy aficionado forum. It’s about all comedy, but it originally focused on the work of Chris Morris (Brass Eye, The Day Today).
EDIT: “Meal” to “metal” 🤦
I still frequent XDA Forums for all of my custom ROM needs.
I can’t say I “frequent” it, but if you ever have ANY troublesome A/V-related question/difficulty, there are absolute wizards of the exact sort you’re imagining lurking over in AVS Forum.
Therpf.com forums if you are serious about making costumes and replica props.
Tomshardware forums are still pretty decent for tech help.
LS1tech.com if you are working on an LS engine. Everything you could possibly want to know.
There’s actually quite a few Internet forums out there that cater to crowds that may be a little averse to technology and adopting things like discord or using Reddit. Car repair, Automotive, DIY construction and home repair, surprisingly quite a few tech forums like XDA developers or Tom’s, machinists, prop-making, Making in general…. Sometimes they’re not very active unfortunately, but they do have a searchable wealth of knowledge.
The biggest Swedish forum on the internet, nutorious for having a very uncensored community (they are hosted in the US as Swedish law isn’t as permissive in terms of free speech, not by much, but enough to make it worth it), so you’ll have to ignore a shitload of racism, sexism, homophobia and more crap to read it.
The reason I read it is that they love discussing current events, if you notice something on the news, a shooting or other gang war stuff you will find a thread about it with the location of the incident, information about who lives there if it is a house or apartment building, this information includes names of possible people involved, their vehicles and countless racist/sexist/homophobic/classist/other remarks, I mainly just want the location so I know what area to avoid.
They also have the greatest Swedish forum thread in the history of the internet:
“Dumma saker ni gjort” - “Stupid things you have done”.
This is a thread that runs 131 pages, of glorious posts of Swedish teenagers in the early 2000s talking about stupid things that they have done. As a Swedish millenial who grew up in and around those years, everything is so amazingly familiar to me, making the thread increadibly funny.
I am not sure how well Google translate will work on the thread, becaue there is a LOT of sloppy spelling, which adds to the charm of the posts, but here is the link:
Planted Tank is great for planted aquariums, and Fish Lore has an active general fishkeeping forum.
Vortex is a Volkswagen forum but has tons of conversation around other brands, too.
The official LOTRO forums are the only official game forums I’ve found that aren’t super toxic. Great community.
Really, I think old-school forums are best for specific niche interests.
+1 for vwvortex!
I do like Whirlpool, an Australian forum primarily centred on technology. It’s still active despite the general decline of forums, has a lot of useful info to turn up in searches, and I appreciate how it has remained clean and fast without the visual clutter and wasted data of modern web design.
Something Awful
I don’t often browse there directly but I do end up there a lot.
The Cartographer’s Guild. Although I have never actually posted there. I just stop by when I’m trying to draw a better map for my D&D games
Board Game Geek is cool, and Metal Archives is useful when I want to check that an interesting black metal band is not, in fact, a pack of nazis
For context, plenty of facepunch forum users came over after they closed their forum.
The stack overflow of PLC programming.
Doomworld for new maps and mapsets for Doom 2 and Heretic.
I enjoy http://tildes.net/ Old style, but with a modern design. You’ll see what I mean.
If you have a Gemini browser such as Lagrange, then gemini://bbs.geminispace.org is one of the better forums there.
Tildes is not an old school forum. It’s just a reddit clone. Nothing of age is bumped to the top.
It’s not a Reddit clone.
The post asks for old “style” forums. Not just forums that are actually old.
I believe old style means linear threads and other oldschool UI choices, not just look/aesthetics. That one has tree comment structure similar to all redditlikes, which (I believe) is relatively a recent invention? Have you seen comment trees like this few decades ago?
The discourse on Tildes is nothing like Reddit thanks to the web design and moderation choices made there. Interactions there are blissfully mature and intentional compared to what goes on over on Reddit. Also, take a look at Tildes and count how many thumbnails you see. It’s just not interesting to anyone with a short attention span who wants to plaster memes around the place.
I get what you’re saying about some UI similarities, but people don’t visit sites to click on user interface components. They’re there for an experience and for that reason Tildes is not like Reddit at all.
https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes
It’s %100 a clone of old.reddit.com
The guy worked for reddit for 4 years, dude didn’t like that reddit was a “safe space” for assholes. So he left made tildes and now bans basically anyone he disagrees with.
That sounds like an exaggeration to me, but the place is healthier than most. Maybe he’s banning the right people.
It was nice, the problem is he bans people who like to discuss anything, present facts, and you get banned if it goes against his political beliefs by any matter.
