Lost online forums

I actually didn't think I had any entries to contribute but now after thinking about it, I have a couple.

The Cartoon Network Fan Talk Forums were probably one of the biggest examples that came to mind. It was a community of viewers that could discuss their current shows, upcoming content and general Cartoon Network news right on the official website. I believe it started at some point in the late 2000s but when I joined in 2011 it was still quite active. I made a lot of friends by posting in a few of the same threads constantly, though users couldn't create their own threads and posts had to be approved by CN moderators- sometimes they wouldn't be edited or not go through at all. It was so inconsistent I still don't know if they used a bot system or had real people reading through them. At some point in the mid 2010s, Cartoon Network revamped the entire forum and allowed for users to make threads. Ironically this became the downfall of Fan Talk because people would spam with new threads so quickly, there wasn't enough activity on the site to keep it going which deserted the entire place. At some point in the mid 2010s they pulled the whole thing down without warning and anything past the first couple pages of posts were not backed up, some threads weren't backed up at all. I made a video talking about this topic in more depth and if it wasn't for the archive I made of my posts at the time, there would be even less content available.

The other big one that comes to mind is the Video Game Memorabilia Museum Forums, it was a community centered around Nintendo merchandise collecting for about a decade from 2006 to 2016. If you were into plushes or figures during this time, chances are you came across it- the main website acted as a gallery for different kinds of merchandise and the forums were an extension of that. I joined in the early 2010s but even before that I can remember browsing them quite a bit, there were so many important and interesting threads that were discussed back then and to this day I still reference the site in my videos that relate to collectibles. With this one though, the site hit some rocky times as the community was changing focus in the mid 2010s and it couldn't find a new identity to keep it going. We knew the forums were going to go down at some point since nobody used them but the site itself went down rather unexpectedly so the whole thing is gone. The Wayback Machine saved some of the interfaces of the site but none of the gallery images load. The forums were saved much better but they're not complete and since we knew this was probably going to happen, I wish someone had saved the site better. I know the owner and from my understanding he pretty much lost interest in it, some of the moderators were taking suggestions for how to save the site before all that happened but no one could agree on how it should be kept going.

Also this is a really great idea for a thread, seeing everyone's memories from their own forum experiences is really cool. I saw some mentions of Animal Crossing forums and while I never used them, I do remember Animal Crossing Ahead quite well. They would often come up during video research and had a great merchandise section that even the Video Game Memorabilia Museum did not.