WE NEED TO FIGHT FOR THE FORUMS OF THE OLD WEB
Forums have played a big role in making the World Wide Web great in the first place. They acted as a melting pot for knowledge and communication between users around the whole world. A whole culture evolved around forums. Not one, but many. Forums served a purpose. They still do. Forums are meaningful. Still. Since the breakthrough of social media and platforms like Discord, forum usage has been in decline for years now. A lot of forums have died already or are abandoned but there still are very active forums and great niche forums with low activity that need us to repopulate 'em. We really should make a turn as the internet society and start using forums again more often. We as well should download and dump forums to be able to archive what once has been written.
You can join the Forum Revival Movement Guild on Melonland to stay updated about our actions and future events.
To add a forum, you can simply help curate our list that is done in cooperation with the 32bit Café community. Just register over there and ask user Xandra for wiki editing rights. I will then add your forum to the Forum Revival Movement list here afterwards.
Help is very much appreciated 
STFU, take me to:
What we shall do
- Start posting to forums regularly again.
- Repopulate existing niche forums.
- Start sharing knowledge, in-depth tutorials or just post some fun stuff that makes other people laugh.
- Keep doing it! It will take some time and effort but new members will finally join when the forum is active and old members may reactivate their account.
- You may as well engage in a bigger forum community that already has a high activity level if you need someones confirmation to feel good
- Start your own niche forum if you have a special interest in something and there is no good forum around.
- Decrease your usage of big hub forums like reddit and social media platforms in general (if there is any).
- Get in touch with admins of forums and ask them to support our movement, share the post database, or restart working on their forum.
- Get dumps of forums (database dumps if possible).
Think of ways to revive old forums, melt forums together into megaforums, and most valuable, how to keep the knowledge available for future generations.
- Spread the word, and use our button to display support and link to the movement.
Button Gallery
If you like our message and want to show your support for the Movement or the forum culture in general, you can embed one of our buttons and link to us.
You can design your own button and submit the URL through the comment box on my main page. I will list your button in the gallery here and link back to your site.
Advantages of forums on the web
- Forums can be well organized and well structured.
- Forums are easy to be moderated; mods can curate topics.
- Forums are great places for group conversations.
- Forums are THE PLACE to discuss your thoughts and beliefs.
- Forums are THE PLACE to start and organize movements.
- Easily indexed by search engines—people can find topics and answers easily.
- They can serve both closed and open communities.
- Forums strengthen relationships and bonds between human people.
- Forums make it easy to share knowledge and tutorials and archive the wisdom of generations.
Why forums are much better than Discord, Reddit, and Quora
- Searchable through major search engines
- The look, forum tree, and everything are fully customizable.
- No need to pay for cosmetics (banners, badges, and profile customization).
- Easier to browse through lots of threads
- Old topics don't get lost.
- Often offer great search functionality on their own
- Users can upload and share files of all sorts (not limited to pictures & video).
- Admins themselves own the data.
- Admins don't lose access to their forums; they can make up their own TOS.
- Admins can take measures against AI crawling and usage of UGC.
Forums can guard their user base against censorship and prosecution.
Since more and more countries are acting against the freedom of speech by putting laws in place that make it easy for them to pursue, track, and hunt down individuals that think differently, while social media and big tech in general act as willful servants to make the prosecution of individuals as easy as possible, we as the internet community need to act against these attacks on the freedom of speech. The ones of us that are lucky enough to live in democracies should make use of our voting rights to fight censorship at all costs. And of course, do we need to revive the forum culture of the old web in general to fight unfreedom?
- Admins can decide what kind of posts/content is appropriate. No one needs to follow the awkward TOS of big tech companies.
- Admins can disable logging of user IPs/data and timestamps, making the prosecution of individuals more difficult.
- Admins can make use of the laws of less restrictive countries by hosting the forum in a privacy-friendly jurisdiction.
- The country an admin lives in makes him less or more prone to legal actions and has privacy-focused laws that value the freedom of words.
Fuck the like button!
We shouldn't crave for likes and upvotes like a trained monkey hits the button that releases some food. Fuck those silly two sentences that give you that miserable amount of social media fame. Your content on these platforms serves only the big tech companies. They earn money with the content you create.
We should start to post meaningful content again, content that inspires and helps other people. We should share in-depth tutorials, reports, and guides. We should share content that has a real value. We should share knowledge and our beliefs. We should discuss every aspect of life, making us stronger as mankind in general. We should... No—we have to!
No one should head to ask AI first.
Make Forums Great Again!
Active Forum Directory
List of active forums on the web
Last updated: Octobre, 29th
General Discussion forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Knockout! - A spinoff of the now-dead Facepunch forums. Here you’ll find comedy, politics, video games and various other creative topics.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Basementcommunity - Basementcommunity is an active message board for talking about general things and specific things okay?
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 The WELL - General discussion board (Paid members only)
Animal & Pet related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇲 Rabbits Online - A forum for rabbit owners with topics about rabbit care, health, diet and much.
Art related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 MelonLand Forum - A forum to discuss all types of art and creative projects.
Webmaster & Webdesign related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 The Admin Zone - An old school forum for admins and webmasters that has been around since over two decades and is still pretty active. Active discussions about community management, the financial side of running a website or webservice, graphic and webdesign related stuff, hosting and much more.
Personal homepage related communities
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 32-Bit-Café - Community of like-minded website hobbyists and professionals helping to make the personal web fruitful and bountiful again. Offers a lot more than only the forum and has an active and friendly community.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 MelonLand Forum - Brings together artists and old web enthusiasts with personal homepages. A friendly communtiy that offers tools for community building, webdesign help and gives great inspiration for personal homepages.
Privacy related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 I2P Forum The forum for anything related to the Invisible Internet Project (I2P), an anonymous network layer that allows for censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer communication using end to end encryption.
Privacy related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Reject Convenience Forum This forum is linked to the youtube account of Youtube Reject Convenience. The forum's main focus is on privacy related discussions. But there as well are discussions about the decentralization of the web and some old web related stuff.
Photography related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Dpreview Forums - One of the most frequented forums for amateur photographers, professionals and pixelpeepers. A lot of knowledge about cameras, lenses and accessories is shared here including in-depth reviews and user made tutorials.
Music related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Music Banter - One of the most frequented forums to talk about music in general, different music styles and scenes. It also features a large subforum on song writing and a smaller, yet still decent subforum about music production.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 KVR Audio Boards - Very large & very active forum, partly about music in general but with a strong focus on making / producing music and the hardware side of things. KVR Audio hosts support forums for a lot of manufacturers and software providers.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Gearspace Board - Very large & very active forum for audio professionals with a very large section about music production and studio equipment. The focus on the hardware side of things is even bigger than on KVR Audio.
Computer related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Bleeping Computer Forum - Anything computer related and more can be discussed here. Questions are usually answered in a timely manner. A place for pros and noobs to hang around and discuss about hardware and software related (nerdy) stuff.
Gaming related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Minecraftforum - Ultra active community regarding everything minecraft. Server setup, modding, addons marketplace, clans, tools, data packs, modding tutorials. Very good forum featuring subforums for all minecraft platforms (pc, xbox, java edition, playstation etc.)
🇬🇧/🇺🇲 The Bell Tree - Animal Crossing related forum, features a subforum for discussions about Nintendo games and acts as a hub for trading and meeting New Horizons players online.
Modding related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Tropicomodding - Forum for modding games from the Tropico series (4, 5 & 6) mod installation instructions, game conversions. Offers Modloader & Ressourcemanager
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Nexus Mods Forum - Active forum. Mainly focused on mods / modlaunchers hosted on nexusmods but has a decent articles and guides subforum for modding games yourself. There also is a sub called modding academy and you can share and discuss ideas for mods and even request mods. I personally don't like nexusmods for its focus on their vortex modlauncher. I prefer to copy files manually, create directories myself but still, this forum has something to offer.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 ModDB Forum - Semi active forum. Topics are modding related, 3D modelling, animation, engine programming, level design, sound design. While being not as active as nexus mods forum, moddb forum has a lot of pearls and a lot of knowledge to share with everyone who dares to dig a little deeper. Still a great info resource. Would love to see this forum revitalize because moddb has been an instance for years and was very active before a lot of people went to nexus instead. Don't know why.
Hacking related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Hack Forums - Blackhat, Greyhat, Whitehat... jailbreaking, network intrusion, website hacking, trojans, malware.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Hack Forums - Temporarily down
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Altenens - Very active forum about hacking, cracking, remote administration & cybersecurity
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Hak5 - Forum administrated by hak5, inventors of rubberducky, o.m.g. cable, wifi pineapple and wifi coconut
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Zsecurity - Smaller forum, needs more activity
Cheating / Hacking in Videogames related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Unknowncheats.me - Cheating related forum for single & multiplayer hacking, game development, engine programming
Roleplaying related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Iwaku role play! - Iwaku is Japanese for Story. The main focus of this community is role playing. The site was started by a bunch of Role player’s from many different role playing sites to create a new and active playground.
Miniature wargaming related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 DakkaDakka - Active Warhammer, Warmachine and Flames of War related forum.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Specialist Arms - Semi active wargaming forum
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 YakTribe.games](https://yaktribe.games/community/) is a community for miniature and board games with a focus on offering tools for creating and managing Necromunda gangs, campaigns & battles. A good place to discuss about modelling, painting & terrain creation.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Chaos Dwarfs Online - Considers itself as the world’s largest and most committed fan group for everything related to Chaos Dwarfs, Helsmiths of Hashut, Infernal Dwarfs, Abyssal Dwarfs & co.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 MelonLand Forum - Has a lot of old web enthusiasts as a userbase and offers webdesign related topics and gives great inspiration for personal homepages.
Science Fiction related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 SFFChronicles - Very active forum. It has everything from book to gaming discussions, a busy movie section. This forum is the brainchild of fantasy writer Brian Turner btw.
Cannabis related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Mr. Nice Forum - A cultivated place to discuss about cultivating cannabis, cannabis genetics and strain related topics. Led by one of the most influential and trustworthy characters in the Netherlands cannabis scene, Shantibaba.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 ICMAG - Quality cannabis forum, advanced topics are discussed here, still beginner friendly community
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Grasscity - One of the largest cannabis & weed forums.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 420 Magazine Forums - Active forum about cannabis use and cultivation
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 ILGM - Semi-active forum for growers
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Growers Network Forum - Semi-active forum for professional weed growers
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Grow Weed Easy Forum - Semi active growers forum
🇬🇧 uk420 - Active british weed growing community
Audio & HiFi related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Audio Science Review - A forum that prides itself on objective, scientific analysis of speakers, amplifiers, and home audio equipment.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Super Audio Best Friends - Another audio forum for HiFi enthusiasts.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Audiogon - A well-known, reliable audio forum.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Audiokarma - A forum focused on discussions about old speakers, with unique information not found elsewhere.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Head-fi - The best forum for everything involving headphones, highly respected in the audiophile community.
Audio Equipment & DIY projects
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 diyAudio - Do it yourself ressource for making speakers, PA Systems, amplifiers and much more audio related stuff.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Midwest audio club - A community for people who build their own speakers. Will relaunch this september (possibly octobre) using Discourse as new forum software.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 GroupDIY - Originated from a facebook group this forum is about discussing and sharing knowledge about how to build and use audio stuff, microphones, preamps, processors, mixers.
Professional Audio equipment & Recording
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Gearspace Board from discussions about equipment to mastering mixes, field recording, musical instruments and music production in general. Live sound, stage lighting. You name it.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 TapeOp Great community for everything recording related. How to record bass drums, how to record guitar riffs. Discussion about microphone setups and recording devices included.
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 TASCAM - Fieldrecorders, audio interfaces, digital compact studios, portastudios. Mainly Tascam devices are discussed here
Forum related forums (Forum Software, Hosting, Admintalk)
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Vanilla OSS support forum
Drug related forums
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Bluelight - One of the biggest drug related forums about all drugs and research chemicals
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Shroomery - Very old but still active forum about magic mushroom cultivation and culinary mushroom cultivation as well
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Drugs Forum - Old and well structured forum about drugs and drug usage
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 - Dope Talk - Semi active forum about drugs and drug culture
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 RXchat - Prescription drug experiences, abuse included
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Substance Abuse Disorder Forum - For people with problematic usage patterns 🐦🔥
🇬🇧/🇺🇸 Poppers Forum - For anythingg Amylnitrite lovers,Isopropyl nitrite, Isobutyl nitrite related
About creating/running/ hosting your own forum
Forum Software
Open source
Proprietary
Discontinued forum software
Specialized Forum hosting services
I would encourage anyone to host their own forum because once a forum hosting service shuts down, the data is probably lost. Has happened a lot of times in the past and by hosting a forum yourself you can do regular backups the forum contents. It is as easy as uploading some files, creating an admin account, changing database user/pw in a textbased config file and running an install script in most cases. This way you own the data and have full control (customization, plug-ins, superadmin powers) but for anyone who wants to rely on a hosted service, here are some that are worth of being mentioned.
- FreeboardsAd-free forum hosting. The only specialized free forum hosting provider with a No Ads/Banner Free policy.
- Pro Boards Since nearly 15 years proboards is hosting forums for free. A paid membership is needed to disable the ads.
- Forumotion offers free forum hosting for over 10 years and lets users choose which forum software will be in use. Choices are: ModernBB, phpBB3, phpBB2, punBB and Invision.
Plugins & Addons make forums even greater.
By using plugins & add-ons, forum admins can turn their forums into full-fledged blogging platforms, image hubs, tutorial exchanges, and marketplaces.
About archiving and downloading forum content
How to dump complete forums
Don't use wget if you are not familiar with it
While wget is a powerful tool, it doesn't work properly when trying to dump modern forums that make use of strings and parameters like viewtopic?p=123 etc. Wget does as well have problems with some themes and the usage of relative paths inside the forum software / theme templates. You can make wget work perfectly fine if you have the means to do so. In a lot of cases, you would have to do some sort of post processing and manually (or batch-edit) the files.
Httrack is a more simple & more robust approach
Download
Httrack and use this instead of wget because it handles urls with strings attached much better than wget does. There are GUIs (graphical user interfaces) available for most versions of Httrack as well. After downloading and installing / uncompressing the files (depending on the version you chose) run the command:
httrack "http://FORUM-DOMAIN-REPLACE-THIS.com" -O "/local/forum-revival-forums" \
"+*.example.com/*" \
"-*logout*" \
"--mirror" \
"--keep-links" \
"--assume php" \
"--depth=6" \
"--robots=0" \
"--clean" \
"--wait=2" \
"--random" \
"--max-connections=3" \
"--max-size=10M"
This command will work with the commandline version of Httrack which is included with most of the packages offered in the downloads section of the Httrack website.
By using this command your computer will wait between 2 and 4 seconds between each request so that you won't get blocked by the server. Wait=2 tells Httrack to wait 2 seconds before sending a new request to the server while --random adds some randomness, making it anything from 2 to 4 seconds between requests. Depth=6 specifies that Httrack will follow all links that are at max 6 clicks away from the starting page. This should be sufficient to download images, attachments etc even in larger forums that contain many subforums. You can increase the depth easily. Depending on the server settings, --max-connections=3 can be too lax or too strict. So find the sweet spot between downloading multiple files at once and getting blocked. The --max-size=10M specifies that no files bigger than 10 Megabyte should be downloaded.
This command will result in all urls matching "logout" being excluded from getting fetched. This means you can possibly lose threads if the forum makes use of URL rewriting (topic of the thread appears in the url instead of viewtopic.php=123 being used for example). If a user has posted a thread named "Why can't I logout of my spotify account anymore" this thread will not get fetched by using the example command above. This is to prevent getting logged out when using Httrack in combination with cookies to stay logged-in to an account. This has to be done if the forum contents aren't available to the public. If you don't have to stay logged-in to fetch the forum, just remove the row "-*logout*" \ and run the command without it.
Fetch a private forum or private file attachments with Httrack
Sometimes you need to be logged-in in order to access the forum, specific subforums or file attachments. In order to get these, you should log-in to your useraccount of the forum and then extract the cookie. If you run into problems figuring it out, check the reference.
This is how it is done in general:
I will quote user Frank Einstein's post on
stackexchange:
1. Login to your website using Firefox or Chrome, then take a look at the login cookie.
2. In the root of the folder where you are downloading your website open the file named cookies.txt or if it's not there just create one and open it.
3. Copy the login cookie from your browser to this file.
(You can also copy multiple cookies if you don't know exactly which one is used for login. Some websites can have a lot of cookies with confusing names that all look like a login hash.)
Then run this command
httrack "http://FORUM-DOMAIN-REPLACE-THIS.com" - b0 -O "/local/forum-revival-forums" \
"+*.example.com/*" \
"-*logout*" \
"--mirror" \
"--keep-links" \
"--assume php" \
"--depth=6" \
"--robots=0" \
"--clean" \
"--wait=2" \
"--random" \
"--max-connections=3" \
"--max-size=10M"
Other Forum Scraper Tools
- Archive-Box - All-in-one solution to scrape, archive and read webpages. The archives made with ArchiveBox can be locally accessed and accessed over internet or lan as well. Tested and approved.
- Grab-Site works kind of well when used with --no-offsite-links & --igsets forums (Forum ignore set) grabs whole forums and saves them as WARC files which can be viewed by using WARC readers.
- Forum-DL - Latest release 2023. Untested
- Forum-Scraper - 2024. Untested
- Xana Forum Scraper - 2020. Untested.
