My own private piece of internet nostalgia

[Rikstah]

This is my own little piece of 2000s internet

When I was a teenager (early to mid 2000s) I came across a forum which was something I'd never seen before. I've tried finding it on the wayback machine but unfortunately it doesn't appear to have been archived.

The forum was called Ameranth RPG. A free form forum where stories were written in chapters by each person in the thread.

It closed down sometime in 2002 and my best friend and I at the time decided that we wanted to run something like this ourselves, we'd moderate the posts and keep the stories going in a good direction. So we ended up creating a hyperboard called "Quedan RPG":

Quedan

web.archive.org

From 2002 to 2005ish we had a little community of about a dozen (at most) players that would share in the creation of classic RPG stories with our own characters injected into it.

Most of our members were uni students or high school students who really enjoyed RPGs or writing. We created so many stories and fleshed out our characters and we learned to cooperate with each other and not overtake each other's narrative.

One person I'll never forget is user "Brother Sanchristi", he ended up joining the army and got shipped off to Iraq... we never heard from him again and back then it was not so easy to track people down. To this day I don't know what became of him.

I did manage to track down one person on facebook because I had them on MSN messenger (before that closed down / fell into disuse) and she had used the same account.

For a few brief years my best friend and I had poured in so much time and care into building a world that existed only in the minds of about a dozen or so people. It may not seem like much but this was our little corner of the 2000s internet and we absolutely loved it. I never really got to know most of the people in real life, but I always like to think I had a second group of really close friends on the net outside of my IRL friends.

 

[lain is here]

This is really cool man, thanks for sharing. I didn't really start using forums and exploring the broader net until like 2009 when I finally got my own laptop (and wanted to learn how to ROM hack which led me to forums). So I missed out on a lot of this stuff. I feel like I was around at the tail end of forums and fansites being popular.

Even back then, I remember I would sometimes intentionally go to the last pages of different sub-boards and read posts from years back. Occasionally I still go back to dead forums that are archived and read the posts there. It's eerie but fascinating. Like being in a ghost town, but able to witness the real conversations that happened a century ago.

 

[Rikstah]

This is really cool man, thanks for sharing. I didn't really start using forums and exploring the broader net until like 2009 when I finally got my own laptop (and wanted to learn how to ROM hack which led me to forums). So I missed out on a lot of this stuff. I feel like I was around at the tail end of forums and fansites being popular.

Even back then, I remember I would sometimes intentionally go to the last pages of different sub-boards and read posts from years back. Occasionally I still go back to dead forums that are archived and read the posts there. It's eerie but fascinating. Like being in a ghost town, but able to witness the real conversations that happened a century ago.

They really are voices from the past! I'd say 2009 was definitely getting to the tail end of community fourm popularity but some forums were still going strong.

I think smartphones are what really kicked off Web 2.0.

It's a shame hyperboards went down, I used to revisit the forum every now and then and get a glimpse at the teenage me haha now I can only look at the front page using wayback machine.

 

[Mеченый Яков]

I kinda understand the feeling of losing an online friend, i lost everyone XD, yet is a great story pal, it puts you in perspective of how people interacted in the early 2000, just scattered forums with few users who were interested in that particular hobby, most people nowadays would find having so few user something "dull", but tbh, is kinda comfy and wholesome, it felts close, like real conversations, you know, like, you ended up knowing and caring for those people like your irl friends, feels like a real person not just a profile picture on a monitor.

Great story, good times, and i hope Sanchristi is doing fine with his life rn.

 

[Rikstah]

I kinda understand the feeling of losing an online friend, i lost everyone XD, yet is a great story pal, it puts you in perspective of how people interacted in the early 2000, just scattered forums with few people who were intereste in that particular hobby, most people would find having so few people something "dull", but tbh, is kinda comfy and wholesome having not many people in a forum or website, it felts like more close, like real conversations you know, like you ended up knowing and caring for those people like your irl friends, feels like real people not just a profile picture on a monitor.

Great story, good times, and i hope Sanchristi is doing fine with his life rn.

Thanks bud! I agree. I mean for us back then, the internet already felt like an incredible ultra connected place, but looking back now it was this "lonely island" effect that allowed us to truly feel some kind of connection to people.

It really is one of my comfiest internet memories, glad you stopped by to read it .

 

[Ixion_SEROV]

This is my own little piece of 2000s internet

When I was a teenager (early to mid 2000s) I came across a forum which was something I'd never seen before. I've tried finding it on the wayback machine but unfortunately it doesn't appear to have been archived.

The forum was called Ameranth RPG. A free form forum where stories were written in chapters by each person in the thread.

It closed down sometime in 2002 and my best friend and I at the time decided that we wanted to run something like this ourselves, we'd moderate the posts and keep the stories going in a good direction. So we ended up creating a hyperboard called "Quedan RPG":

Quedan

web.archive.org

From 2002 to 2005ish we had a little community of about a dozen (at most) players that would share in the creation of classic RPG stories with our own characters injected into it.

Most of our members were uni students or high school students who really enjoyed RPGs or writing. We created so many stories and fleshed out our characters and we learned to cooperate with each other and not overtake each other's narrative.

One person I'll never forget is user "Brother Sanchristi", he ended up joining the army and got shipped off to Iraq... we never heard from him again and back then it was not so easy to track people down. To this day I don't know what became of him.

I did manage to track down one person on facebook because I had them on MSN messenger (before that closed down / fell into disuse) and she had used the same account.

For a few brief years my best friend and I had poured in so much time and care into building a world that existed only in the minds of about a dozen or so people. It may not seem like much but this was our little corner of the 2000s internet and we absolutely loved it. I never really got to know most of the people in real life, but I always like to think I had a second group of really close friends on the net outside of my IRL friends.

View attachment 11845

This is truly a fantastic slice of internet creativity from several standpoints.

As you probably have noticed, Dungeons and Dragons has become immensely more popular in recent years. Comparing the size of the community now to its size a decade ago is like night and day. It's incredible seeing people engaging in a medium that was once considered too far-flung for the average Joe.

More importantly than the game however is the art of crafting a narrative. This is a dying art, I'm sad to say, and I always valued someone's ability to use a fantasy medium as inspiration or guidelines rather than a hardline tabletop you stuck to. I always believed that a DM and player should work together to craft a story rather than worrying constantly about stats and numbers. If your character has enough gumption and effort put into their legend, I always allowed the victory.

 

[Cecil]

The sight of your piece of the past reminds me of my own. I belonged to a phpBB forum called GSOdyssey- Golden Sun Odyssey.
It seemed to be a very advanced site for what functionality it had. Players had their own EXP and items to acquire through "gameplay" and posting.
All things considered, it was really cutting edge in my mind. It's sadly, like all the rest, no longer around. You can see it in WayBackMachine, though! At least, you could for some time.

 

[DeathToMicroWaves]

I wish i could do something like this it would be so fun

 

[E R I L A Z]

dude, that brings me back to https://www.heroscapers.com/community/blog.php?u=2 , it's a forum for this tabletop game that's been discontinued since like 2008. There's still a decent amount of people active of there too

 

[Jared]

This is my own little piece of 2000s internet

When I was a teenager (early to mid 2000s) I came across a forum which was something I'd never seen before. I've tried finding it on the wayback machine but unfortunately it doesn't appear to have been archived.

The forum was called Ameranth RPG. A free form forum where stories were written in chapters by each person in the thread.

It closed down sometime in 2002 and my best friend and I at the time decided that we wanted to run something like this ourselves, we'd moderate the posts and keep the stories going in a good direction. So we ended up creating a hyperboard called "Quedan RPG":

Quedan

web.archive.org

From 2002 to 2005ish we had a little community of about a dozen (at most) players that would share in the creation of classic RPG stories with our own characters injected into it.

Most of our members were uni students or high school students who really enjoyed RPGs or writing. We created so many stories and fleshed out our characters and we learned to cooperate with each other and not overtake each other's narrative.

One person I'll never forget is user "Brother Sanchristi", he ended up joining the army and got shipped off to Iraq... we never heard from him again and back then it was not so easy to track people down. To this day I don't know what became of him.

I did manage to track down one person on facebook because I had them on MSN messenger (before that closed down / fell into disuse) and she had used the same account.

For a few brief years my best friend and I had poured in so much time and care into building a world that existed only in the minds of about a dozen or so people. It may not seem like much but this was our little corner of the 2000s internet and we absolutely loved it. I never really got to know most of the people in real life, but I always like to think I had a second group of really close friends on the net outside of my IRL friends.

View attachment 11845

Thank you for sharing this with us, maybe one day something similar will start up?

 

[Rikstah]

Thank you for sharing this with us, maybe one day something similar will start up?

No worries bud! I think there are still some table top / other free form type RPGs being run through forums these days. Although I haven't looked into it for quite some time.

 

[Jade]

hey, that sounds like a really cool forum! I've come across several freeform roleplaying sites with similar themes in the past, never signed up for one but it was always interesting seeing how unique each of them were and the kind of worlds they were able to create with them.

 

[ilyria]

bloodninja will always be one of my personal faves.

 

[Rikstah]

dude, that brings me back to https://www.heroscapers.com/community/blog.php?u=2 , it's a forum for this tabletop game that's been discontinued since like 2008. There's still a decent amount of people active of there too

Just looked into this, its impressive how active this forum still is!