General What was your first forum like?

[Cedric]

Reflecting on the past, my journey into the world of online forums began around 2003 with the creation of "Gamers Kingdom" on a phpBB free hosting service. It was a very brief venture, as my experience was very limited. Honestly, I didn't know what I was doing. I pretty much copied over someone else's forum. However, I soon discovered InvisionFree, which marked the real beginning of my forum development endeavors.

What's the story of your inaugural forum? How did it fare? What topics did it explore? Can you recall the moment you entered the realm of forum administration? What inspired you to establish your very first forum community? Is it still accessible online, perhaps as a digital time capsule for you to visit and stroll down memory lane? Share your experiences with us here.

 

[Al]

The first forum I was heavily involved in was gamingforums.com - I was, for a spell, senior admin. I retired from the staff there on 11th October 2006 with some 25000+ posts under my belt. This was the good old days of forums. Before social media killed them. I found my retirement post! https://editthis.info/gfwiki/Notable_Events#AzH_retires_for_good.

 

[MrDawn]

I started a forum 10 years ago called "Anime West" and got some people from a gaming forum called Hyperkin to join and then on several forum promotion websites to get more people and after awhile people just quit being active and the forum started becoming too much of a chore to deal with, so I closed it down.

 

[Cory]

It was a Yu-Gi-Oh board dedicated to the TCG on InvisionFree and it had a fair run, but I started getting more interested in other things and lost interest in it and put the board offline. I don't remember much about it in terms of stats, the layout, or if I even had any staff members. It was sometime in the early 2000s I created the board, I think, so it was quite a long time ago.

 

[~ True Legend ~]

My first and only forum is a forum for nerds. Love y'all nerds <3

 

[Jason]

I can't really remember what the first good one was. I know I set up some music ones and used Postloop to populate them. Anyway, my first forum, aside from it being anything worth looking at, at all was phpBB installations (and then later SMF and MyBB) I made and unfortunately I couldn't understand spambots so I gave up.

 

[~ True Legend ~]

I can't really remember what the first good one was. I know I set up some music ones and used Postloop to populate them. Anyway, my first forum, aside from it being anything worth looking at, at all was phpBB installations (and then later SMF and MyBB) I made and unfortunately I couldn't understand spambots so I gave up.

I recommend StopForumSpam plugin. Xenforo comes with that functionality built in with the option to moderate/reject registrations on the database

 

[Jason]

I recommend StopForumSpam plugin. Xenforo comes with that functionality built in with the option to moderate/reject registrations on the database

I use backward questions on my XF forums and it works and it also works on free forum software, but at that time before I was ignorant.

 

[~ True Legend ~]

I use backward questions on my XF forums and it works and it also works on free forum software, but at that time before I was ignorant.

By backwards questions do you mean like cat = tac ?
Would you say these questions are more effective than questions that can be googled and CAPTCHA in terms of avoiding spambots?

 

[Ravenfreak]

My first forum was based around ROM hacking the Pokemon games. At this point, there were only tools you could use so you were limited to what you could do with the Pokemon games, and I didn't know how to run a forum let alone really do much with hacking the Pokemon games so it was a failure. This was in 2009 or 2010 and I used Forumotion to host it. The only members I had were my spouse, a few real life friends, cousin, a member from Sonic Retro.

 

[Cam]

My first forum lasted for about a week, and it was a sports forum on ProBoards. I was staff on another sports forum on ProBoards and I started my own for fun one evening... Certainly wasn't a serious endeavor.

 

[~ True Legend ~]

My first forum was based around ROM hacking the Pokemon games. At this point, there were only tools you could use so you were limited to what you could do with the Pokemon games, and I didn't know how to run a forum let alone really do much with hacking the Pokemon games so it was a failure. This was in 2009 or 2010 and I used Forumotion to host it. The only members I had were my spouse, a few real life friends, cousin, a member from Sonic Retro.

It’s epic you managed to get your RL friends to join 😍

 

[Ravenfreak]

It’s epic you managed to get your RL friends to join 😍

That was the only time I got my real life friends to join one of my forums. :V My spouse will join my forums here and there, but they don't use forums that much unfortunately...

 

[Reverie]

My first forum was a Kingdom Hearts roleplay forum. I'm struggling remembering which one was first. I had one named OATHKEEPER and then another named.... wow... my brain can not recall. Either way, I had made this forum due to being a member at other forums about Kingdom Hearts and enjoyed discussions and the idea of roleplay. I remember one of the themes I used for Oathkeeper was a Kman black and red theme. On the other forum I somehow found a theme with Kingdom Hearts icons!

I think this adventure began my interest in creation of forum communities. I enjoyed creating the forum and perfecting creative ideas!

 

[prophet]

Man, hard to say. I vaguely remember trying some ventures that had no one join pre-2010. The first "mildly" successful forum I ran was probably GFX Street back in 2012 or so that had around 50 members and 2000 posts. I also did another version of Otaku Paradise in 2014-15 that had around 4000 posts and 50-60 members. I've more-so contributed to a few that were successful instead of running my own that was successful.

If I had to say which was my very first created board, it was probably Pixel Point. I had assembled what I had thought was a incredible staff team at the time, myself, tokyodrift/brendan, jackson, and robbie. We also had over 10 staff applicants that we were in the process of going through to see who fit what we needed. Plan was to become a resource hub for ZetaBoards forums. It never opened due to IRL obligations and the timezone differences between all of us as Administrators. Definitely could've been a great venture.

I vaguely remember opening a Pokemon discussion forum awhile back, think it was called pokecafe or pokejoint. Never amounted to anything though.

 

[~ True Legend ~]

My first forum was a Kingdom Hearts roleplay forum. I'm struggling remembering which one was first. I had one named OATHKEEPER and then another named.... wow... my brain can not recall. Either way, I had made this forum due to being a member at other forums about Kingdom Hearts and enjoyed discussions and the idea of roleplay. I remember one of the themes I used for Oathkeeper was a Kman black and red theme. On the other forum I somehow found a theme with Kingdom Hearts icons!

I think this adventure began my interest in creation of forum communities. I enjoyed creating the forum and perfecting creative ideas!

What motivated you to start your own forum over merely participating on others?

 

[cdub]

My first forum was an addition to my site that hosted student films in 2000.

Wayback Machine

I used infopop's hosted forum software. (Until I switched to XF in 2014)

Before that I had a geocitities site for a band I loved but there wasn't a forum.

 

[Spartan]

My first forum was gamingcave.com before I lost the database and domain name.

Gaming Cave

web.archive.org

It’s pretty funny in that capture we are talking about playing mw3. Today on. gamingcave.net I’m talking about mw3, Some things never change lol

 

[cdub]

Wayback machine is a trip

 

[Reverie]

What motivated you to start your own forum over merely participating on others?

Simply I had ideas and wanted to create my own thing. I was 12 years old and thought I had the best ideas ever. It was an interesting time on forums. I wanted to be the very best and offer the most lol.