Old forum trends

[Syko Nachoman]

This thread got me thinking about some of the "good old days" features that a lot of message boards used to have back in the early and mid-2000s, stuff that used to be super common back then but which don't seem to be very common now. Some of them that come to mind for me:

Affiliate Banners: Remember those little buttons, usually something like 100x30 pixels in size (there was actually an exact, standardized size that I don't remember), that showed the name of your forum that you would use for "affiliation"? Basically, you and another forum owner would both agree to put each other's affiliate banners in your forum's footers, and people could, in theory, click on them to go to each other's forums. In reality, I doubt anyone ever clicked on them, but it would be fun to scroll to the bottom of a random forum and look at the thirty buttons linking to external forums, most of which had nothing in common with the forum you were on. And occasionally you'd catch someone failing to link back to your forum after you added their button, or you'd find dead links to forums that had been shut down, so you'd have to go through your own affiliate banners occasionally to clear out the dead weight.

Top Sites Lists: Ranked lists of random forums where people could vote forums up or down, which would determine their ranking on the list, with the highest-ranked forums being shown at the top. In theory this could help some less-popular forums to gain more visitors, but in reality it was mostly a "rich get richer" system where the already-popular forums dominated the list, and I doubt very many people cared about any of the forums on the list other than their own, anyway. But you'd still check every day to see if your forum had moved up on the list at all, while encouraging all your members to vote for your forum in a futile effort to improve its ranking.

Visitor Counters: These were definitely not specific to forums, but you still saw them all over the place. Back in the days of celebrating meaningless milestones, it was a big deal when your counter reached a notable number like 10,000 or 100,000. You'd make a thread saying something like "Hooray, 100,000 visits!" and all your members would pretend to be really excited.

What else do you remember?

[Chani]

Back before Google Fonts, you had to use the same boring font options that came installed by default across all OS's so that everyone could see them (or risk it defaulting to Times New Roman for most people, and nobody wants that!) A lot of people used Comic Sans in a desperate attempt to add some character and, because of that horrendous fad, I still can't stand that font or any handwriting font that slightly resembles it. I visited a forum once that said "best viewed with x font" with a link to install said font. I personally made images using the fonts I wanted and used a search & replace script to put them on my forum. Desperate measures!

The note about affiliate banners reminds me how popular "small" used to be. Small text, small images, small websites. I remember having a width of 500px on one of my forums, using a "blinkie generator" to make an animated pixel gif for my signature, using 8px as a font size. I think a lot of forums still use small text, at least, but the rest of the web design world has made everything big. Oh, and I remember downloading an emoticon set. It was the PB default emoticons, but with Santa hats, and I used them for the holiday season. OH! And custom cursors used to be cool, too.

I also remember a time before we had built-in shoutboxes. You had to set up a cbox on cbox's website and copy & paste the embed code into your headers/footers. 

[Darkmage4]

Nov 16, 2022 9:55:06 GMT -8 Syko Nachoman said:

This thread got me thinking about some of the "good old days" features that a lot of message boards used to have back in the early and mid-2000s, stuff that used to be super common back then but which don't seem to be very common now. Some of them that come to mind for me:

Affiliate Banners: Remember those little buttons, usually something like 100x30 pixels in size (there was actually an exact, standardized size that I don't remember), that showed the name of your forum that you would use for "affiliation"? Basically, you and another forum owner would both agree to put each other's affiliate banners in your forum's footers, and people could, in theory, click on them to go to each other's forums. In reality, I doubt anyone ever clicked on them, but it would be fun to scroll to the bottom of a random forum and look at the thirty buttons linking to external forums, most of which had nothing in common with the forum you were on. And occasionally you'd catch someone failing to link back to your forum after you added their button, or you'd find dead links to forums that had been shut down, so you'd have to go through your own affiliate banners occasionally to clear out the dead weight.

Top Sites Lists: Ranked lists of random forums where people could vote forums up or down, which would determine their ranking on the list, with the highest-ranked forums being shown at the top. In theory this could help some less-popular forums to gain more visitors, but in reality it was mostly a "rich get richer" system where the already-popular forums dominated the list, and I doubt very many people cared about any of the forums on the list other than their own, anyway. But you'd still check every day to see if your forum had moved up on the list at all, while encouraging all your members to vote for your forum in a futile effort to improve its ranking.

Visitor Counters: These were definitely not specific to forums, but you still saw them all over the place. Back in the days of celebrating meaningless milestones, it was a big deal when your counter reached a notable number like 10,000 or 100,000. You'd make a thread saying something like "Hooray, 100,000 visits!" and all your members would pretend to be really excited.

What else do you remember?

I always clicked on them, as they would usually be final fantasy 7 RP forums. I would read hours of threads of the RPs when I was bored.

Also, I had my own top site link site that me and a friend made, which gave you a global affiliate bar with newly added affiliate buttons everyday!

As I got older and priorities changed significantly, the site went down. (I still have the files! All before HTML5 and CSS3) it was a lot of fun running that though! Had proboards and other forum services on it, people would submit after reading the small ToS, and I would go through their site. If it was proboards or one other service, usually it was an automatic approval.

I had tons of fun with it!

I miss all the design competitions, or other competitions hosted here on support. Always loved seeing all the designs people came up with for support.

Otherwise, I don’t really remember too much.

[Bob]

Nov 16, 2022 9:55:06 GMT -8 Syko Nachoman said:

This thread got me thinking about some of the "good old days" features that a lot of message boards used to have back in the early and mid-2000s, stuff that used to be super common back then but which don't seem to be very common now. Some of them that come to mind for me:

Affiliate Banners: Remember those little buttons, usually something like 100x30 pixels in size (there was actually an exact, standardized size that I don't remember), that showed the name of your forum that you would use for "affiliation"? Basically, you and another forum owner would both agree to put each other's affiliate banners in your forum's footers, and people could, in theory, click on them to go to each other's forums. In reality, I doubt anyone ever clicked on them, but it would be fun to scroll to the bottom of a random forum and look at the thirty buttons linking to external forums, most of which had nothing in common with the forum you were on. And occasionally you'd catch someone failing to link back to your forum after you added their button, or you'd find dead links to forums that had been shut down, so you'd have to go through your own affiliate banners occasionally to clear out the dead weight.

Top Sites Lists: Ranked lists of random forums where people could vote forums up or down, which would determine their ranking on the list, with the highest-ranked forums being shown at the top. In theory this could help some less-popular forums to gain more visitors, but in reality it was mostly a "rich get richer" system where the already-popular forums dominated the list, and I doubt very many people cared about any of the forums on the list other than their own, anyway. But you'd still check every day to see if your forum had moved up on the list at all, while encouraging all your members to vote for your forum in a futile effort to improve its ranking.

Visitor Counters: These were definitely not specific to forums, but you still saw them all over the place. Back in the days of celebrating meaningless milestones, it was a big deal when your counter reached a notable number like 10,000 or 100,000. You'd make a thread saying something like "Hooray, 100,000 visits!" and all your members would pretend to be really excited.

What else do you remember?

Oh man, yeah, the affiliate banners.  Don't know why 88x31 stands out to me, but I think that was the actual dimensions.  Those were so important, haha.  You'd get your theme set up, probably downloaded from SSD, and then sought out a designer to get your affiliate banner.  You just weren't serious unless you had one, haha.  How about the convention back then being to set up an affiliate section beneath your info center, with a marquee going through all of the forums you agreed to link with?  That was some high-tech stuff back then!  And really it was just the early days of link trading for SEO.

[coolcoolcool]

This doesn't really meet the theme, but this thread made me think of it so I'll post it anyways. Remember when proboards forums used to have a number in the domain?

I think ssdesigns was something like ssdesigns.proboards17.com

Btw affiliate banners were the cat's pajamas. I discovered so many forums back in the day through those bad boys.

[coolcoolcool]

Also Syko. How ARE YOU STILL POSTING HERE. You're more reliable than the sun.

[Syko Nachoman]

Dec 23, 2022 16:07:28 GMT -8 coolcoolcool said:

Also Syko. How ARE YOU STILL POSTING HERE. You're more reliable than the sun.

Fun fact: Scientists estimate that in approximately 10 million years, the sun will be setting its watch to me.