What inspired you to start your first forum?

Everyone’s got a story. Maybe it was a niche you were passionate about, or maybe you just wanted to build a community from scratch. What got you into forums in the first place?

My very first forum, waaaay back in the invisionfree days, was a html/css/js forum. one of the first, I think.

I started using message boards to trade Yu-Gi-Oh TCG cards. In my teenage years, I was wondering how message boards were created, so I asked in an off-topic section on one of the Yu-Gi-Oh message boards I was on. One of the links was InvisionFree. I decided to start a Yu-Gi-Oh message board on InvisionFree that had a decent run. When I started diving into the forum world, I became interested in how they were developed and how people created scripts for them. That's where I began my journey coding for InvisionFree, then ZetaBoards, and now Jcink. I hope to continue my legacy on Forum Spark, too.

It was back in 2011 I believe, I had coded a MMO similar to RuneScape and I wanted to create the community for it. I started in Forumotion. I had looked into other hostings but I don’t remember why I stuck with Forumotion.

Sir_Chivas said:

It was back in 2011 I believe, I had coded a MMO similar to RuneScape and I wanted to create the community for it. I started in Forumotion. I had looked into other hostings but I don’t remember why I stuck with Forumotion.

I think Forumotion has evolved into a great platform. Haven't visited for a while though. How active is it still?

I created my first forum in 2017, it was a support forum for multi author blog I was running at that time. The forum was for in-house authors to discuss on various topics, including posting payment confirmation.

For me, the motivation was simple frustration. Social media discussions were too shallow. I wanted a place where conversations could be meaningful a little. Years ago I watched people debate topics intelligently on forums and I admired that slower pace. Though attention span has reduced drastically. Still, I believe forums preserve deeper discussions better than most platforms.

The first forum I started was a football niche. This is because of the passion I had for football which pushed me into starting the forum. It's a shame I gave up on the project when I did and I regret that decision.

I have never started a forum, but I have started a blog a long time ago. There are so many people who have started their own forum and I also plan to start mine. It is quite inspiring.

That kind of regret can be very painful. But it has happened to many of us. I stopped one project too early because I thought nothing good would come out of it. Looking back now, I just needed more patience. These things don't blow up overnight.

2016 - the RPC community was chronically opening and closing forums very quickly. I was on 12 at once, hoping at least 4 stuck around. None of them did. They all shut down within hours to a couple of weeks of opening. I was so sick of it, I just made my own forum. I wanted a place to last, at least as long as the story.

It lasted 4 years (which is pretty impressive for the time), because the story had finished by that point. But, my members got so mad at me (even though they knew this would happen), that I made a sequal to said forum (even though I didn't want to) that lasted for another 3 years. The sequal ended because the community became a not-good place and I was completely spent. I had had enough after 7 years.

After a 2 year break, I'm making my third forum - this time with Spark. I was so inspired by a new forum host that I had to try it lol. I have ideas on how to foster a better community this time, too, based on my past failures.

I didn't create my first forum, and didn't own it either, but I run it and have a huge say in what goes on there. It's a Christian forum and it's been around for 11 years with organic activity that I feel makes us accomplished, even though we aren't as successful as I had hoped.

After that I created Crafter Craze, but it didn't gain activity and the cost of upkeep aggravated me, so I gave it away.

On Mar 18, 2026, Cool-writer said:

I have never started a forum, but I have started a blog a long time ago. There are so many people who have started their own forum and I also plan to start mine. It is quite inspiring.

Blog is something that's going to very difficult for me to start because of how engagement works on blogs. It's completely different from forums and that's what makes hard for me with blogs.

My first forum was a private roleplay board on Zetaboards, back when I was a teenager. I was butting heads with a specific player back on Gaia (in hindsight, very inappropriate boundaries - talk to your teenagers about how to extract themselves from relationships with unhealthy adults!) and I made a private board where me and my other friends could vent about That One Person.

My forum never went anywhere, none of us really wanted to give up the massive community size that Gaia had. Eventually we grew up enough to figure out how to cut ties with that toxic adult and went our own ways, so the safe haven part became moot as well.

Still, it was a fun place to write stories with my boyfriend until unlimited texting became a thing, and I learned a little bit about CSS messing with themes.

My first one was in 2002 or 2003(probably 03). I was huge into cars(still am a bit) and created one. Then I did a miscellaneous chat forum in 2004. I started Sonic Blast in 2006.