Other Cool Forums (You're On)

[Parabox]

So. Anyone know of or is on cool forums other than MetConst? Links and descriptions to them are welcome.

[Zhs2]

Oh, man. If I even catch a whiff of advertising in this topic...

[Silver Skree]

I used to be on MDb, but I ragequit the whole place a good long while ago. Haven't really been on forums a whole lot aside from that. Jul was pretty cool for the couple of weeks I spent there, but the pace felt weird to me, so I never really got into it or the community. Though that was where I met the 744 man and Bitmap. That said, I may consider hanging around with them again and seeing if I can't get a little more into the community and make some friends.


By the way. You can be expecting a Hiroshi-LongPost™ in this thread very soon.

[Digital_Mantra]

Used to frequent some electronica forum but after I got into metroid hacks I migrated.
I only ever go there for info on new albums/artists/concert listings.
I'm not the kind of person that can hold down 2 things at once (unless they're boobs).

[RYNO]

I go on ultimate guitar alot...

It's like /b/ but censored and reasonable. Plus! We talk about guitars and amps and gaytards and oh you know....
[spoiler]if you know what /b/ is just don't say anything...[/spoiler]

[interdpth]

LOL 4CHAN.ORG IT'S SO FUNNY LOL

[Hiroshi Mishima]

Awww, I read this and started to think of what I'd say then I seen it said "(You're On)" and I had sad face, because a lot of my stories involve forums I'm not on anymore. Man.. I have all kinds of anecdotes about places like Project Jenova, Metroid Database, and Code Master's Game Shark Code Creator's Club (or "CodeTwink" as it's stupidly called now)... Good times, bad times, lots of memories.

Looking at what Silver said reminded me that I DID actually try to hang out at Jul, but like him it felt kinda odd and I just didn't feel like I really fit into the community all that well. As I've gotten older, I've become more jaded about Humanity and communities and social networks.. to the point where I find it hard to really fit in anywhere. This is one of the only places I still hang out at, anymore, to be honest.

...I feel like I both seeded the ideas for a new thread, and went totally off topic all in two paragraphs. Of course, since they're about 3 sentences each, it's hardly paragraph material, but whatever..

[Parabox]

All posts that aren't bullshit contribute, you know.

[Lunaria]

I'm hanging on this awesome forum that is kinda about metroid, except there is not really much metroid discussion going on anymore.

Regardless, it's pretty darn awesome and I suggest you all give it a go, I'm sure you will fit right in! :D [link]

[Digital_Mantra]

[zephyrtronium]

Crys won it.

[Zhs2]

I'm hanging on this awesome forum that is kinda about metroid, except there is not really much metroid discussion going on anymore.

Regardless, it's pretty darn awesome and I suggest you all give it a go, I'm sure you will fit right in! :D [link]

[Hiroshi Mishima]

All posts that aren't bullshit contribute, you know.

All right, I'll call that bluff and see what unfolds.

[spoiler=Holy shit, long post]Between 2002 and 2007 I was a member of a message board known as Project Jenova (or just PJ), as it was the forum attached to Planet Zebeth, which I'd wandered to one day after Kabutroid talked about his comic over at the then much smaller MDb forum. Hah, the kind that would push messages/threads out after too many new ones popped up. I have so many memories of Project Jenova, and I'd love to say they're all good ones, but I'd be kidding myself. Still, 5 years of trying to hold a community together wasn't too bad, I even met my fiancee there.

...Only five years, eh? Wow, feels like it was closer to eight or nine... Anyways...

When I first came to it, PJ was a nice little community, not unlike this, really. Random people flocked to both because of the allure of something Metroid related. In this case, it was a sprite comic of surprising popularity. Popular enough that Wikipedia came to despise it cause folks kept trying to make a page for it, and Wikipedia is very broken, after all, afraid to actually put interesting or well known things on their site if they can't find 50 thousand "third party sources" that don't include websites, blogs, and/or common sense. I think it eventually did get a page though, since PZ'd been commented on by a couple of news sites like 1-up and such.

But I'm not supposed to be talking about Planet Zebeth, I'm talking about PJ. ..or /pj/ as it would later be known... but more on that later...

Oh gods did I have fun on Project Jenova those first few years. As a small community everyone knew everyone else and we got along fairly well. There were a few problem areas, like the occasional troll or "really stupid person" (although I admit it can be hard to distinguish the two sometimes), but overall it was friendly. Most of the actual higher ups knew each other offline and were fairly close by each other though I can't recall just how much so. It was an odd place, mind you. Even though Planet Zebeth had a home there, it wasn't really a Metroid related board. If I had to pin anything to it, I'd have to say it was largely goth-based. I mean there was a literal Goth Forum, possibly two, actually... and things like uJournal were popular back then, so many of us had those too. Off and on during the first two years the admin, Night-Red (who was also Kabutroid's room mate at the time) kept tinkering with this site-based game called Vampire the Birth Right or something along those lines. It took on a couple of forms and probably had a variety of names that all kept in with that theme. This was long before Facebook and it's Vampire Wars and FarmVille and such, which are essentially the same thing but with better technology.

The Vampire game really attracted people. I'd say that about 3/5 of the board was found by people because of goth, vampires, and other stuff like that. Oh, right, one of the forums was a goth-based forum, the other was about Self-Injury. The concept more than the practice, and was also a place for people to talk about their woes, I think, but I can't be sure of that bit. Pictures were not forthcoming, thank goodness. But the rest of the members tended to consist of Metroid fans who would find the board and slowly stick around. During 2003 and 2004, the population of the board exploded. It was starting to climb around the very end of 2002, but it was nothing compared to those two years. And around that time, something else started to become insanely popular on the board: Role Playing.

We'd had this one post-apocolyptic RP thread going about the PJ community after the end of the world and trying to survive for a good while back in 2002, and it was a lot of fun. But with new people came new RP threads and new ideas and new people who liked that kind of thing.. so we got ourselves an RP thread. I was later made Moderator of it, which with much irony I would mentally take note of how I used to be the mod of an RPG forum on another board previously. I was actually offered the spot of RP mod on another forum later on, but that's another story. The threads had all kinds of themes. You had ones based on existing material like Mega Man or Resident Evil, ones that took existing material but had little to do with it specifically like taking place IN the Star Trek universe but nothing to do with the cast of said shows, and of course you had original ideas. I actually enjoyed some of those non-based ones, and as time went on you got more and more original-ish feeling RP threads of varying degrees of success. What I particularly liked though, were the situational ones, and we only ever had one or two of those going at any given time. Hah, Night-Red came to loathe them for whatever reason, possibly cause he got into an argument with the guy who had originally started the trend. But that guy, SilverThorn, was someone I came to consider a very good friend.. which is funny cause when we first met on the forum, I couldn't stand the guy. That's a trend that seems to pop up from time to time still.

But no, these situation threads were about.. say, a house. And people in the PJ community who had characters they used in a lot of RPs or just themselves in general would come in and we'd life in-world, so to speak. Strange things might happen, like a monster attacks the house or some of us would go on a trip and disaster would strike. That kind of thing. It was also a fun place to flirt with people, too. Ah.. *sigh* I had some good times back then.. oh gods, was I ever a flirt, but none of the ladies (or occasionally the guys RPing as ladies) ever seemed to mind. I got into Instant Messenger programs like AIM and Yahoo back then, though they'd be replaced by MSN later, only to be replaced for a time yet again by AIM when the other stopped working for me.

I think it would be safe to say that I was both very well known in the community and rather popular. Or at least, very well liked, I should say. I was the guy people went to when they had stuff they wanted to talk about but not on a forum or not in a chatroom, they wanted a one on one discussion with someone who'd listen. So I was never without someone to talk to. (lol) And the girls! Hah.. the girls always enjoyed talking to me. I was a guy who didn't get put off by feminine talk and I was always nice to people which made them feel better about both themselves and about life in general. At least until something else came up as it occasionally did. A good chunk of the board was between 16-24 by the middle years of PJ, and I had turned 22 in 2002, so I wasn't really outside my peer group, so to speak. I got on well with most people provided they weren't complete fraktards who just needed a good kicking, and even then I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. Hah.. big difference from how I used to operate back in '99 over at CMGSCCC, but that was my first real message board experience and I'd rather talk about that another time.

So let's see.. nice community, healthy activity, and people I could call friends all over the place. Couldn't be happier, right? Well, as always happens, once I start getting happy life eventually takes notice and stomps on my sand castle.

I don't remember exactly when it started, but I'd say it probably began in 2004, though didn't become a serious issue until 2005. A certain website many of us are familiar with, even if in name only, became very, very popular and attracted all kinds of people. Let us simply call it /b/ although I'm pretty sure it was more than that which they were visiting. By sometime in 2005, there was a group of people who frequented PJ and their unofficial leader was a guy named Space Whale (aka Ridien, who was/is an MDb'er who I'd met in 2002). Before, Ridien was a pretty okay guy, and he didn't cause a lotta trouble. At some point he was made a moderator of the Zebeth forum and he kind of let it get to his head and he lost the position rather shortly thereafter. I don't know if that was a factor or not, but it wouldn't have surprised me. So, Space Whale and his /b/tards were becoming a serious problem on Project Jenova. They trolled, were rude to newer members, and in general were complete asshats. Around this time, however, there was another problem which is probably one of the reasons it all happened like it did... the existing forum staff was largely impotent.

By that, I mean that the Admins, Night-Red and Kabutroid, were rarely ever on. In fact, NR really only ever "graced" us with his presence if he was going to be a dick or had tweaked the forum yet again in some asinine way that no one had even been interested in. Nah, NR was as good as written out of almost all of this stuff. We had to rely on Kabutroid as our admin and by this time he was having IRL problems such a work, family, and so forth. Our Super Moderator, Daemona as she was eventually called (formerly Dark Angel and I think one other name) was one of those people who really couldn't care less about what happens on the forum if it doesn't involve her directly. As such, she would generally be "super bitch" when something got so out of hand she had to step in because we'd apparently "trespassed on her time" as I always felt she saw it. Now I'm just an RP moderator, and I'm well known, and I don't take shit. So the people were very rarely if ever stirring up trouble in said forum cause they knew they were toast if I had that opportunity. Actually since Space Whale was a former mod anyways, that was even more of a reason he was a threat. Because he knew how the hierarchy worked and what areas were most vulnerable. The -chan'ers would hit the Main Board generally, where there was normal dicussion and other subjects, but also the Metroid section from time to time. They also rendered the Paid Member Forum essentially worthless. They got into SO much trouble in there, and because it was the Paid Members Only section and only a small portion of us actually were, nobody ever really contested them in there.

In fact, it was largely in said section where I would eventually become the target of their assaults. I guess they thought they'd drive me off or something, or maybe it was all for the lulz, which is also a very good assumption. Even a couple of people I'd come to know and like had been sucked into the group of about a dozen or so. People who were my friends were occasionally the target of their trolling, but no, it was almost always centered on me if it was on anyone in particular (which it occasionally was). There was little I could do about it. I could talk but it wouldn't mean anything because I had no power to back it up with, and they knew it. Other mods tried to some degree to keep the peace with varying degrees of success, but it never stayed quiet for long.

When me and my fiancee hooked up, she became a frequent target. I'm amazed she stayed at the board the whole time I did, really, or that she even remained with me through it all. A lesser person would have said it wasn't worth the trouble for someone who lives halfway across the continent and left. But she'd become a well known member of the community in her time as well, because like me, she had started a sprite comic albeit in the Metroid section not on the site, but she had become a member cause she was drain in by the comics, and mine in particular she had liked. We did our best to combat the tides and keep the rest of the community together with the other mods who actually gave a damn. Heh.. it was kind of like a war at times, come to think of it... and there were indeed times where the "Awesomites" as they came to be called (other people were "nards" and the phrase " 'sup nard" became a meme) would stop being jerks and become fun and active members of the community again. But it was like being in a gang and they're very difficult to get out of, so it'd start back up again or new members would replace ones that left. Which we had a fair amount of during those years.. people leaving in disgust or anger.

By 2007, Project Jenova felt like a demilitarized zone. Yes you could still talk and carry on conversation, but you were always a little wary because any second now someone might come in and start shit for no reason at all. Hell it wasn't even Project Jenova anymore, it was /pj/ or /b/-lite as the Awesomites liked to call it. We had a chat room by then and it was never a fun place to hang out if you weren't part of the crowd. And rather like here, it spilled over onto the forums from time to time, although it was discouraged by both sides. It was no longer a place I could really call home, and so I occasionally branched out to other forums from time to time, like the EarthBound community at Starmen.net, which is a fun place to go and I still visit infrequently. Unfortunately, no place was really safe for me. One day, I discovered I was being followed at different sites, and I would later find stuff in the Paid Member Section pertaining to whatever site I was visiting at the time. I'd become known for my dislike of hentai, mainly when it involves known/named characters from games and other normal anime. So at one point I started seeing EB hentai and/or ecchi type images being posted in threads that had nothing to do with them except that I'd posted in them at one time or another.

By this time, I'd lost my RP Moderatorship because as said, NR is a complete dick and against everyone else he decided off the hat that if someone had been banned for any reason, they were invalidated from being moderators or holding said positions. Back in 2006 I'd gotten into a big argument with a well known trouble maker (who actually wasn't one of the group) called Ganymede... who claimed to be a middle-aged woman with kids but spent an awful lot of time on the forum for a busy homemaker, and certainly didn't talk like a mother. And I made a post telling Gany to shut the frak up in the wrong thread, one that was heavily flamed in and people'd been warned not to start shit. Well, apparently telling someone who was being rude to people to kindly stuff it was enough of a flame at that point that I was banned along with said person. I discovered my position removed and then replaced by a gender-bending /b/-tard with a penchant for loli's and traps named Bridget. Which probably wasn't the best idea, as he would become one of the factors which would later help tear the forums apart in 2007.

So most of my friends are gone, others have been corrupted into complete bastards, and I've got no one I can turn to for help when the chips are down. Why do I even bother hanging around still? Probably because I'm stubborn and I'd been firmly rooted to that forum for so many years that the thought of leaving it for good could put me in a right panic. I still had a few friends who hung around, and there was enough life left that I could still eek out a meager existence. But eventually all empires must fall, and PJ fell harder than I'd ever seen. Among the awesomites was a very intelligent guy named Frog.. or gorF.. or Lord British.. or whatever else he called himself at the time. I seem to recall him being "moot" for a long time, too. I'm not joking when I say he was smart, cause he had shown many times in the past that he was clever and knew how to get things done. So, he and another formed a plan. Unbeknownst to all of us, as the PJers were considered spies in the chatroom now and weren't trusted (which became worse when their own spy, Bridget, was perhaps unwittingly undermining us from within because he actually thought it was the right thing to do)... unknown to us, Frog and a.. long time friend of mine, L33ch (who had made Super Mod some time back) fiddled with the board a bit and now Frog was Night-Red in name, profile, etc.

Night-Frog then tells us that the board is going down soon. He's tired of paying to keep it running and that we only have a while before it happens and to enjoy what's left, or something to that effect. Well, as you might expect, the board descended into utter chaos. All the rules were gone, anything goes, and everything comes back again. After a while of that, someone decided to start merging threads. Little by little parts of the board were eaten by other parts and this continued until we had a massive thread filled with all the posts from other parts of the board. But it didn't stop there.. oh no.. and it got rather lulzy by this time, too. Gave me a reason to hang around a little bit longer, I'll say that much. A few mods had gotten it into their heads to start regurgitating posts and threads from the trash can, which made the positively bursting thread even bigger. And so, once all was said and done.. the truth is revealed. The site isn't closing down, it was all a big joke, and the whole site fell for it. Eventually the real Night-Red showed up and yelled at everyone, but no one really listened cause all he ever did was yell at people and be a douche-bag. The thing that got me and a few others is that the ones responsible weren't even punished. Wasn't any real logic or reason about it all, really.

So, I finally left. I still had access to the Staff Forum through my fiancee, who had been made a Global Mod sometime back.. not that it really helped much. Even when I was gone for a brief spell she was still targeted. Anyways, I logged onto her account and banned my own account until 2035 and did if I log in I can't even look at the board, just see the message about being banned. That'd keep me from posting or wanting to go back. Mind you, I did check back sometime in 2008 or 2009 (I forget which) and discovered someone had foolishly lifted the ban, even though I made a note in the account saying the ban was to remain in place. Although the forum does, in fact, still exist it's not even a place to visit anymore. So while I did stop by to say hi, that was really all it was. Just a passing glance. Over and done with. Five+ long years and nothing to show for it besides my then fiancee, of course.. and even that didn't last forever. I saw people turned against each other, I saw intelligent and rational people become blithering idiots/bigots when it suited their needs, and I watched helplessly as people I knew and cared about drowned in the inferno and became something.. different. I knew from then on, I'd probably never find another community I'd fit so well into. I still haven't, really.. I mean if I really, truly fit in here I'd be around more often and wouldn't get into arguments so easily.[/spoiler]

But yeah, that's the "big" story. I've got others but I'll let this one stew for a while. I'm out for now.

[Waker]

I remember trolling Jenova a good couple of times. Was fun.

[Hiroshi Mishima]

When was that, do you remember? Granted I don't have a great memory for names of minor trollers and I honestly wasn't around nearly as much as I used to be in the last days before the "Reset" as it were.

[Malpercio]

*coughCaveStorycough*
is awesome forum, really. used to be at Miraigamer.net, but the person that owns that domain got tired of cave story/the crap the community was kicking up and so the forums got moved. everyone who was anyone worth talking to moved with, and it's at least as, if not more, funny to me than this place was when i joined.

[RYNO]

LOL 4CHAN.ORG IT'S SO FUNNY LOL

I'm surprised someone knew about "it", but not surprised that you knew...
And rules 1 and 2...
:lol:  :lol:  :lol:
:lol:  :lol:  :lol:
:lol:  :lol:  :lol:
/lolstack

[Hiroshi Mishima]

It's true they've supplied a lot of lulz over the years, but equally if not more so is the amount of bullshit they've inspired. Much of it not even related to them at all, just the 'tards who are infected by it and escape.

[Silver Skree]

4ch is not a forum.

It's an imageboard.

[Lunaria]

4ch is not a forum.

It's an imageboard.

Per definition, 4chan is a forum, as it's a place where people gather. :P

It's not a message board though. ;<D

</smartass>

[Hiroshi Mishima]

To be perfectly honest, the overall layout/look of 4ch reminded me very much of what MDb's message board used to be like. You have some posts and some threads and if you make new threads you push the older stuff off forever. The same concept works on 4ch and most of what are known as image boards. Image boards and Message boards work from the same concept/principle, and even look largely the same. To say one can't be considered the other is silly. Back in the day, that was the only way to have forums, unless you referred to the ol' Bulletin Board style message boards, which is what CMGSCCC used to have before they adopted the more common style we have now.

[Tyjet66]

Sorry for not finding this thread sooner but...

I'm always looking for new forums that I may be interested in so I might as well share which ones I'm involved in, in case someone else feels a need to join a new one:
[spoiler=duh]http://forum.metroidconstruction.com/[/spoiler]
[spoiler=Gotta love puzzles]http://www.speedsolving.com/[/spoiler]
[spoiler=any surprise here?]http://m2k2.taigaforum.com/[/spoiler]
[spoiler=NEED MOAR MINECRACK!!!]http://www.minecraftforum.net/index.php[/spoiler]
Not sure if I'm allowed to post this one or not, if it's a problem either remove it or inform me and I'll remove it:
[spoiler=18+ ONLY]http://forum.xnxx.com/[/spoiler]

[Black Soldier]

Currently, I frequent only this one and a Fire-Emblem-based forum called Serenes Forest.

I used to go to m2k2 and a Yu-Gi-Oh! forum called ETC Forums.

[Smiley]

This place. Duh. I don't post very often tho.
Game Maker is fun!
I hang out here a bit too, but not much. I just check the blog and come back tomorrow.