Sure thing! Here it is, the Hero’s Hideaway! Again, still getting it off the ground, but I plan on being more active there myself :>
Also yes, please do treat yourself well!!!
Hi! I want to boost a forum that was instrumental to getting me into the planted tank hobby, PlantedTank.net . They have had a serious decline in users lately, but the Tank Journals are an incredible resource - people make a journal page about their progress on a project, solicit advice, update it months later, and post successes and failures.
It’s nice to see online conversation around ongoing projects in threads like this vs disembodied posts about the current state of a thing. I should probably make some posts to contribute 
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Thanks! One advice I can give you straight away, your forum does not reflect what it is about. Whether in the title nor in the description. Even the names of the the sub-forums give no hint what your forum is about. If you want other Pikmin fans to join, change the title to something like “Hero’s Hideaway - The #1 international Pikmin forum on the web” or something along those lines. If you want, I can give you further advice. Just ask.
That actually is a great idea IMHO 
If you like, you can start by adding your forum to the list
########################
Everybody can add active forums to
our (Active Forums on the Web) post
within the community wiki area 
########################
from Tuffy with 
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Noted! I’ll brainstorm some ideas, though I do want to note that the forum + subfroums are named after an area + subareas in Pikmin 4. It’d be like naming a Zelda forum Faron Woods, or a Pokemon forum Pallet Town.
I’ll probably go with “Hero’s Hideaway: A Pikmin Forum” or similar :]
That’s a good idea. Thanks for the clarification. Having your targeted audience know what the forum is about when browsing is one thing but having it listed on the first side of search results for pikmin forum or related terms is the other. You could as well try to explain what makes your forum different from other existing pikmin forums. Like, the most cozy place for pikmin fans or something similar. If you really put effort in creating a community, you can make it flourish, even today
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Coincidentally about the time this thread was started, someone remarked to me how they miss forums these days. And I thought they are still around, surely it’s just a matter of finding them. So as a little experiment I kept track of the forums I stumbled upon while just browsing the web.
Turns out there are a lot, who know :), what I also realised in the last 3 months was that collecting all of them is a task that is way beyond the capabilities of a single person. I feel like a forum phon
ebook (forumbook?) would best realised by a collaborative approach. A wiki of sorts seems like the best approach imo.
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I see a need from the art end of things. Artists miss the famous conceptart (dot) org forums, because people would chip away at their sketchbook threads and they would get really impressive. Then the website was sold or taken over or something and killed that really healthy ecosystem people still talk about 10+ years later. Some forums did something similar since then but most of them are dead. I’m in art discords now and the irc nature does kinda make conversations disorganized or stray where having sketchbook threads kept people focused and others liked to look through them. Or perhaps for people chipping through bigger projects like comics.
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I’d love to see a rebirth of art forums devoted to different genres of art. I’ve tried a few art discord servers and subreddits, but most were either overcrowded or dead.
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A real forum keeps your threads alive for a very long time and people will find your posts after years, new people will discover your art. You don’t have the same opportunities with discord…
Which art forums do you frequent?
That is true. You can engage by help us working on the community wiki here: Active Forums on the Web
Add new forums, write descriptions. We appreciate any1 who is willing to help. Would be dope to have you on board! You can message user xandra here and ask to get access to edit community wikis (it’s restricted for new board members)
I currently have not as much time as I wish due to a real real life struggle I’m in atm but I will be back soon
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That is another thread in a forum. That has the same disadvantages that the primary post is only editable by a single user. Searching through that is going to be a pain with increasing numbers. I’ve barely scratched the surface and already have a list of nearly 500 forums.
They way I’m picturing this, is as a page per forum with the url, a short description and maybe some basic stats like genre, language, last post, number of members.
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actually the primary posts of our wiki threads can be edited by most users (you need a certain level of activity first to avoid spam) which is a pretty good solution without having to create a whole external platform
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@Michkov, I like that idea. We can achieve this together. You can already edit the post (ask for permission to edit the wikies by contacting the user: xandra here on the 32bit forum.
We can also think of hosting our own wiki style forum for collaborative editing and curating. Send me a dm if you are interested!
I’m either too low on the totem pole or too dumb to find the DM button in this forum, but I’d like to send you one once someone points me in the right direction. 
This is a great thread! I tried to compile my own list specifically for active art forums not very long ago in a word document… a difficult task that was. This is much better, so I’d like to contribute.
Could you consider adding krita-artists.org? It’s mainly a forum for artists who use Krita but it has categories for traditional artworks as well. It’s very active.
Edit: I just noticed we were supposed to add suggestions to another thread, and someone already mentioned Krita Artists. My bad
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An interesting take from discourse themselves.
with so many actors trying to do “AI search optimization” they suspect that forums work far better with AI search for similar reasons that adding “Reddit” to the end of Google use to work so well.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ may as well take the wins we can I guess…
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I agree with the sentiment, but it will never happen so long as forums like “Melonland“ are at the center of it. “Melonland” is one guy’s boring “safe space“ of empty nothing discussions. Old forums had very specific topics and were often dedicated to singular fandoms, or other singular niche hobbies–like a specific local sports team or entomology–as examples.
Reddit killed forums. Not discord. Discord has it’s own purpose and use. It’s great to use amongst friends you actually know. Reddit is the trouble.
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I don’t disagree with you, but I would suggest if a young person is venturing beyond walled gardens (including Reddit) for the first time, they could do worse than Melonland as a first experience of old-fashioned web forums – even if it is one guy’s boring “safe space” to an old salt.
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I am extremely old…….
I made my first website in 1996, so I might not be much younger. I don’t think it’s archived anywhere, though, but that’s fine.
going back to the conversation of aggregating pre-existing forums VS creating tutorials for making forums themselves, i know i’d certainly benefit from a tutorial. like a super dumbed down explain this like i’m five one.
I agree that it takes a certain knack and character to be a successful community moderator/builder, but sometimes its not about being the best community leader but rather being the one within your community willing to put in the legwork. like once i make a forum i’d have no problem passing off mod-ship but at the same time i’m nigh-certain that space will NOT get made unless i’m making it, because my friends (myself included) aren’t particularly tech-savvy.
sincerely- someone who fucked up installing MySQL on their computer and is now 70% sure they Didn’t Actually Have To because it’s on the webhost provider cpanel
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