Messageboards in 2026

[NowhereMan]

So last year, in 2025, I was studying people, products, things I can benefit form or interested in, and I was looking for specific messageboards to post photos of them, discussions, ask questions, but they were no more like in the 2000s. For example, I am working on a Marilyn Monroe project. Assuming that there would be some sorts of actual fan community or messageboards for the actress, I could not find anything. But I would like to assume that in the 2000s I would have probably been more likely to find a messageboard of her. Now we have social media, X, Instagram, Reddit for that. 

So what are your thoughts on messageboards in 2026? Do you have any ideas to make them last? Make them more active? What are your thoughts on the messageboards of MFGG?

EDIT: Do you still visit any other forums/message boards other than MFGG?

[littlelum]

I think the best way to get message boards to be active is to use them. Sure it sounds obvious, but I'm guilty of just hoping someone comes along and posts something so I don't have to do it myself.

As for other message boards, I occasionally go onto Melonland. There's a few others too, like the Mario Kart Players Page and Bibby Team that I only visit occasionally.

[VinnyVideo]

Good question! It's a bummer that a lot of independent forums have died out over the past decade, and few new communities have sprouted to replace them.

But all hope is not lost! A growing number of people are frustrated with the corporate-owned walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Even Discord is threatening to go public, which will quickly send them down the road of enpoopification.

On an individual level, my main advice is to take the time to be active! If you're working on a project, share your progress on the Development or Arts boards. If you play an interesting game, make a topic in Gaming. If you notice a bug on the mainsite, create a ticket in the Suggestions board.

If you're an admin or a site developer, I think one of the biggest problems with forums is they usually run on older software that was developed with desktop view in mind. But over the past 15 years, many Internet users have shifted from browsing on a full-sized screen to doing most of their browsing on a phone or tablet. So choosing forum software and forum themes that work well on all screen sizes is important. I'd love to see more forums running on Jaxboards (shameless plug), which delivers outstanding performance for both desktop and mobile users.

Besides MFGG, I'm still active on the Bibby Team Forums and the GameFAQs Contributors Board.

Course clear! You got a card.

[NowhereMan]

As for other message boards, I occasionally go onto Melonland. 

I like it, thanks

[Louis Paul]

I think the reason for that is the change of age demographic. In the late 2000s and early 2010s people preferred computers for accessing content, the internet was less bloated, and smartphones were more primitive and limited on features. Nowadays this has changed, people became too hooked on smartphones, they don't care anymore about computers unfortunately.

Another forum that I occasionally participate is the HP Museum forum. I also have an account on Hackaday.io, where I posted project logs for the RetroChallenge 2024/10 and 2025/10.

PS: does the MFGG IRC still exist? I found it buried in the wiki, and if the channel still exist we could be more active there.

Check out my SMB1 Hack development thread: Journey Into Plumber Subconscious

[KungFuFurby]

I have a few that I still visit from time to time over the years...

• Nesdev.org, which also has a SNESDev section. This is the oldest one I have account-wise that I check out semi-regularly, as it dates back to 2008.
  
• The SNESMusic.org forums, which just recently revived after a seven year hiatus. This is the longest continuously active-ish operation that I have, as the account's from 2010, but I've been contributing SPC sets over there since 2007, and they started on the now defunct Yahoo Groups.
  
• SMWCentral, mainly due to my involvement in one of their tools as of 2020. I had signed up in 2016, but was never active until after 2020.
  

MFGG is one of the ones that I was less active on over the years, in hindsight, though I enjoyed the occasional flashback or two. Just that I have other places that I tend to look at more often... and Discord.

[Hyper]

I personally believe Message Boards are more ideal place for showcasing projects and topic that requires asynchronous response like troubleshooting (I would leave AI with a big grain of salt). For small stuff and casual conversation, I think Discord is better at that. I personally don't feel so thrilled for Discord threads because it gets buried faster. Message Boards is better when it comes to search, Discord is spotty, especially when a user was deleted, banned, left the server. And last, it makes sense to have the full flexibility of user data of being stored at MFGG hosted servers than being hosted elsewhere on Discord.

EDIT: I personally dislike MyBB for the constant battle for updates and errors/bugs caused by plugins. I still felt like going back to PHPBB might be the right direction with the security patches applied as a more stable route. I'm not sure how MFGG operates during its PHP days in the 2010s but the forums genuinely felt more stable at that time.

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[VinnyVideo]

@Hyper A lot of MFGGers who have been around for a while have fond memories of the phpBB (or IPB) eras, but I don't think changing forum software will do much to fix to the issue of AI crawlers crashing the MFGG server. I think implementing Cloudflare offers the best chance of improving the performance/stability issues.

Some other stability issues have stemmed from PHP upgrades. These occasionally caused disruption and frustration as we debugged the root cause of PHP warnings and other small defects. On the other hand, if we'd never updated MyBB's software and plugins, we would've been in for a very rude awakening when we found an emergency PHP upgrade was needed. Being careful not to fall behind too far in MyBB/PHP upgrade schedules may have saved us from having to deal with a prolonged period of downtime.

Course clear! You got a card.