What is your favorite small internet forum? Whats your favorite story/drama from it?

I was part of a small-ish gaming community in Germany and was a mod there too. It was a great and tight-knit community and I made some friends there that are a part of my life even long after the forum died down like 10 years ago.

I think the biggest drama was that one of the mods / admins had some kind of online / long-distance relationship with a female user that was also part of my gaming clan. She met with some other guy IRL and due to a jealous fit, the mod-admin deleted her account from the platform and blocked her from rejoining. When I brought this to the rest of the mod team, he cursed me out, left the mod team and his admin post in a huff and that was that. Still weird to think about it, but all in all this forum was my lifeblood back then

I'm sure a lot of other car enthusiasts will agree with me on this. Lots of niche car community forums are amazing groups of people.

I was a member of several but two different ones come to mind. For the owners and enthusiasts of 1990-1993 Honda Accord, there was a forum (it's still there but rarely used) to discuss anything and everything related to this car. https://www.cb7tuner.com

I once posted a question about replacing a certain part and how expensive it was to buy one from Honda. Within about two days, I had probably a dozen people from across the US and Canada who went to their local junk yard and found the part I needed and were willing to send it to me. When it was all said and done, I had three different people ship me this part. One was from Oregon, one may have been from Louisiana, and one may have been from Quebec.

I did this two more times after that. And when I sold my car, for a couple of years later whenever someone else asked about certain parts, I'd send them my leftover parts which I had no use for since I had sold the car.

That community was great.

I had a very similar experience on the Acura Legend forum as well, though I sold that car after only about a year of owning it.

I used to be on a forum called NationStates, a medium to large set of forums that was nevertheless much smaller than, say, reddit or any major social network. Part of this was its focus on politics, both roleplayed and discussion of IRL political news and political debates. Each user joined as a fictional nation, with its own flag and motto, and could join "regions" of nations with their own message boards and an entirely player-run World Assembly to present, discuss, and vote on international laws.

One perennial issue was of raiding, in which a group of players would all join a region at once and promptly vote in their own leadership to 'steal' the region and kick out the original members. Raiders had their own dedicated regions, and a counter-faction - defenders - formed for the purpose of counter-raiding and returning the regions to their original members. Regions could implement a password lock on joining to act as an ultimate defense to raiding, and the World Assembly had its own subforum to censure raiders or override the password lock on raided regions.

With that background established, in 2014 a raider was made a mod, granting them the Red Username of Power. And one of the first things they did was submit a proposal to override the password lock of a region that didn't want to be raided.

All hell promptly broke loose. The thread reached 75 pages, and was locked repeatedly for 'cleaning' by the mods, whose opinion was that the OP's actions as a player and mod were separate and they hadn't broken any rules by submitting a proposal while a mod. The natural counter argument was that simply by being submitted by a mod, the proposal appeared to have their endorsement, and that the player was abusing their new status to put up a proposal that would never otherwise pass and making arguments based on falsehoods to back it up, which was conduct unbecoming of a moderator.

Nations started a petition to get rid of him, and changed their flags and mottos in protest. Mods responded by saying political mottos, even in-game political mottos were barred by the rules. In particular, the paraphrased quote "Lying is only politics" got repeated across forum signatures and flags for months.

Before I found Digg, (so pre-Reddit) I spent a lot of time on the bodybuilding.com forums, specifically Misc.

That sub forum had nothing to do with bodybuilding and it was highly entertaining. It was basically a bunch of hilarious “gym bros” talking nonsense- it developed its own distinct subculture. A lot of it was crass and crude, but I can’t even fathom how many hours I spent there in my early 20s.

I was on a forum dedicated to discussing Megaman games in the mid 2000s. There was a very active female user (Remember the 2000s, girls being interested in video games was nowhere near as common as now.) who mostly hung out in the general sections more than the game discussion sections, just chatting, and she was very popular and flirtatious on the forum.

Guess who wasn't really a girl. They posted a photo of themselves that was a picture of some japanese model and got called out. It hit some users she had been flirting with like a ton of bricks. She was banned, but the forum wasn't the same after that and eventually shut down.

By far my favourite forum during the 00s was the one of Sprite Database. It had the perfect blend of gaming enthusiasts and creatives, with everyone having a common interest in 8, 16 and 32-bit video game sprites and general pixel art.

Drama? There were a few, but none too shocking or terrible. There were a couple of users that were pretty universally hated, but just about managed to avoid technically breaking any rules for a long time.

There was also an attempt at a community made video game. That had lots of drama and never came to fruition, but I look back at it with fond memories.

Richard's Animorphs Forum.

Started in the early 2000s for the middle-grade book series Animorphs - we weren't the biggest Animorphs fan forum (that would be, uh... Animorphs Fan Forum), but we were the best, in my entirely unbiased opinion. The fan-scanned ebooks that kept the series afloat online were a project that started there, as well as my own Audiobook Project that managed to produce one (1) fan-made audiobook, years before the official ones existed.

We were also just an incredible community - at a certain point, the actual books became secondary for a lot of us, and we just kept coming back for each other. Some time around 2011, a group of us started planning RAFCon - an offline meetup for as many of us as logistically possible. We scheduled it for the far-off date of Summer 2015 (because at that point, all of us who wanted to go would be of legal drinking age...), and by the time 2015 rolled around, even though some of us had toned down our forum usage / moved on entirely, we still got about a dozen of us to meet up in Washington DC for a long weekend. Our group spanned 4 countries (and 3 continents!) and we spent the weekend hanging out, going to the zoo, watching movies... It was amazing that we all immediately clicked with each other like we'd been long friends - which we had, we'd just never met in person. I think by 2015 this wasn't as special in the broader internet space, but when we thought it up in 2011, it seemed weird and crazy, and the fact that it went off without a hitch felt really good.

Orkut. I remember long philosophical discussions held civilly and how happy I was to have such an outlet. Then they were shut down.

There was no drama that I know of.

A while ago I found a really old Bitcoin wallet that had still 0.002 coins left in it, but getting it out meant I had to download the whole ledger, which was hundreds of gigabites. So I asked on a private BitTorrent tracker if someone could help me out, and almost immediately, someone offered to help. It took some messaging back and forth for about a week to figure out how to share the wallet anonymously and securely. And then they told me that it wasn't 0.002 coins but 0.02 which was worth $100 at the time. (I don't remember the exact amount of zeros involved, but the factor was 10.) They could've just send me my 0.002 coins and I still would've thanked them enthusiastically for all the help.

I try to think of that story every time I lose my faith in humanity.

In high school in the early 2000s, some friends and I started a multi-user fan fiction forum set in Middle-Earth. It was me (a dude) and five girls, including my girlfriend. We would each post chapters (kind like journal entries) and build off each others' storylines. Super fun and I wish I had saved them.

http://newcafe.org/ This began as Cafe Utne, an offshoot of a magazine called Utne Reader. Eventually Utne sent it off to live on its own merits and it still struggles along today. I read and posted regularly for years and still lurk to see what the remaining regulars are up to. There's not much activity any more, but a few forums are still active. The folks in Relationships, for example, would be very happy to have new people join them. They need some fresh conversation topics. Head on over and sign up! Depending on the forum, discussion will be friendly and intelligent (Relationships, Nook, Food) or possibly more heated (Politics, Currents).

The drama there was the ordinary kind that comes with sharing people's lives for a long time. People got married, had children, divorced, got jobs, retired. As the population aged there were deaths in the community, deeply felt by everyone else there.

I used to love bit-tech.net

Technology forums that I existed on from early 2000's to the day it closed a few years back.

Drama? There wasn't a lot of drama, but there was a great community who had some wonderfully headstrong characters who'd just tell you "Don't be f***ing daft" and it's hilarious.

If you've never seen The Dumbest Boy Alive by Jon Bois, it's an amazing video that does a deep dive into 5-page, 129-post flamewar on a bodybuilding forum over how many days are in a week.

I was a part of the now-defunct Auxy Disco, a community/support page for the iOS DAW Auxy. By nature of an iOS app for making music, regardless of how powerful it was it was always going to have a very varied userbase age-wise. Fortunately, there was no drama in this regard, it turned out to be a great place for people to share their music and various other things. The one bit of drama that I recall was a regular getting a little too heated in a debate, and ended up getting banned by the developers of the app, not even a moderator of the forum, it went straight to the top.

I used to help run a popular 90s cartoon streaming site which used IRC for the chat functionality. One particular 'highlight' that comes to mind - during the second incarnation of the site, two users started roleplaying about their sex robots, albeit in the #nsfw channel but also in a very much public channel for everyone to see.

I used to be part of a manga and anime forum based out of somewhere in south america, McAnime.

It used to be one of my favourite hang outs, more precisely the gaming subforum. Used to post every single day, was mod for a while but I found reddit and then stopped being there.

After a while the community aspect of it was closed and if I remember correctly the “company” was bought by crunchyroll latam.

I miss that place a lot and all the friends I made there.

When I was pregnant with my first kid I devoured all of the advice I found on the Mothering.com forums. They are very Attachment Parenting and I embraced it all (well, almost all - there was some vaccine skepticism on there). I somehow also found a forum called Diaperswappers, for cloth diapering families (but really for cloth diaper obsessed moms) and also one for baby wearing (I can't recall the name). I was in my crunchy Earth Mama era. I especially loved Diaperswappers because it exposed me to people I would never have met in my urban bubble - there were lots of military families and religious families with 6+ kids, and I found the peek into their lives absolutely fascinating. I thought of the forum recently and was so sad to see that it had disappeared. ETA: I just checked out the Wayback Machine and now I'm feeling so much nostalgia (if you're interested: https://web.archive.org/web/20170122041121/http://www.diaperswappers.com/forum/)

I was never super active on forums until Reddit, but my wife was semi-famous on tumblr and fanfiction.net for her writing when she was in high school. If only she’d been old enough and in a time where she could have profited off of that like people can today.

The old xkcd forums. Those sustained me throughout college. I seemed to have drifted away from them around the time I got big into Reddit.

Back in the early 00's I was part of a board devoted to discussion of the Wheel of Time series, wota.com. It's been defunct now for quite a long time. The only drama I remember was with various love tri/quadr/quint/+angles.

The Egosoft forums.

Years ago I bought and binged on X3TC for hours. It's a slow burn game with a steep learning curve, so the community was very helpful with advice.

One part of this forum was the Creative Universe. Players shared stories about the progress in their games. Some even weaved a narrative into it too. Me and a few other players all collaborated on one such story.

It was good fun, and probably the best online community experience I ever had. It might even still be going today.

Planet-Halflife forums. I was a user there for what seemed like eternity, probably from when the forum first opened in like 96 or 97, until they finally killed it by converting it from the old Lith Forum style to a pretty standard forum style. In spite of being a pretty big game, the core forum was what seemed like maybe 10 or 12 people who regularly posted and kept up with each other's lives. I was on there pretty much every day in my teen years.

PHL had a forum rivalry between the Planet-Blood users, each occasionally delving into the others forum to shitpost. Nothing major really came of it, but when PHL eventually was killed off, one of the old users created his own, based on the Lith style forum that he then invited the Blood users to, as they were also out of home.

That eventually died too, but lives on in a tiny forum with maybe 3 or 4 active users now. Every couple of years I drop in and say hi for a few days; even though it's not the same anymore, it's nice to see it still living on. Seems like every 5 years or so the forum ends up moving to a new, bespoke site and somehow I always manage to track it down.