This is a thread for discussing, link sharing, gossiping about, and advertising forum websites ...
My favorite forums are old, but old can have downsides. A lot of times the community will have changed a lot from the past (Something Awful) or the users will be really bitter about the fate of their communities (&totse). From a new user's perspective, old can also mean more impenetrable.
Perhaps the best forums are just the ones that are so niche and the users are so fixated that its impossible for their core idenity to be lost.
I prefer forums that don't have huge documents of rules and mission statements, but that's a personal preference.
Here is Something Awful in 2004
https://web.archive.org/web/20040804005305/http://forums.somethingawful.com/
Feel free to post links to or gossip about other forums.
If you're going to use this space to advertise your own forum,
it will get more visibility if you include an image.
It's pretty funny to mention these forums together since they are diametrically opposed philosophically but cover similar subject matter, especially relating to nostalgia for the old Internet.
I used to post on both, although I don't log in to Melonland much anymore. It's artistically interesting and worth a visit. But the whole site is positively infested by furries. To his credit, Melon never banned me for not fitting in, but I eventually awoke to realize that there wasn't much point to staying.
Agora Road is a lot more free. You can feel in every interaction that it's more natural communication compared to Melonland, which always feels like you have eyes evaluating how positive and happy you are. And even if no one steps in and removes you, which I can respect that, you feel bad for not shooting sunshine and rainbows out of your ass everyday. You know for yourself if that is something you're into or not. If that's you, no shame in it. It was made for you.
This is why Agora is ultimately my preferred nostalgia forum, although I think Melon is a great web artist. Agora is also infested with its own undesirable elements, like post-4chan retardation, a lot of religious users is a thing (not a problem exactly but), for some reason there is always someone who wants to mention femboys; but it's easy to just ignore the people that you don't want to talk to and only participate in threads that you do. Because of the relative freedom, Agora has a reputation that doesn't really match what the site is.
This is the best example I've seen of a modernized old forum.
At some point they switched to discourse.
https://boards.straightdope.com/
I never knew about the old one but it's pretty neat that they've been around for so long and someone's been holding it together and keeping people posting in an on topic way.
Very much an effort posting forum.
You can poke around on the old one, too.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110320033400/http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/
Since I'm not from this community, I don't feel comfortable telling you what it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOTSE
You can explore it here.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010202061000/http://totse.com/
The site no longer exists but it spawned a child forum, zoklet.
That forum died, and it spawned a child, NiS. https://niggasin.space
I probably wouldn't have started with racial jokes in the title of the forum since it seems the effect is that people rarely post unless they are shitposting. But overall I like the freedom of the place and its a window into the world that used to be totse.com. I believe that's part of their identity anyway: formerly being an information resource for taboo topics, and now just being composed of shit posters that know each other from the past.
There's also this one, although I haven't looked at it much: https://newtotse.com/
https://www.freeones.com/forums/
literally a porn site with forums, up since 1998
the whole forum went behind a paywall last month
it used to be funny because you could go all the way back to 1999 and looking at what porn sharing culture looked like back then. it's probably not worth paying for though.