Hey everyone, I'm an old school member

[NowhereMan]

I joined the forums back in 2005. I used to be really into old school Mario games when I was younger, I found a sprite comic website called Geoweasel back in like 2002-2003, and in turn I created my own sprite comic website called Silver Koopa and Friends and together we had a pretty big sprite comic community. One of the people in the community was a MFGG user named Sergent Jinpen. At the time I was here, I just really enjoyed the MFGG community, pointless posts palace, drawings, Duckboy, Shadowman, I used to talk to Roxxorz Your Boxxors quit frequently on AIM chat. The jokes, the pranks, the fun all had me coming back day after day. Here is my wiki:  Nowhere Man - Mario Fan Games Galaxy Wiki

I haven't been active here since like 2008. I am interested in gamemaking, and came back to play some of the games on the main website. What have I missed????

[WasabiCatto]

MFGG went through a lot of changes, many PhpBB forums and now we have this one that runs on MyBB

Also, I did joined in 2007 as Darkyoshi. Does that name ring a bell?

Most activity now is done at the Discord and I am trying all sorts of things to bring back activity here :P

"shy guys are wall plugs confirmed" - Vitiman on Club Saturn Ex

[NowhereMan]

The name sounds familiar, but I was mostly lurking in 2007. Awesome to see you as site admin. I deleted Discord from my desktop, what sort of things do you all do on there?

[VinnyVideo]

Hey, welcome back! I don't think we've ever chatted, but I remember seeing your name and liking it. I always liked that Beatles song!

It's possible that a thing or two has happened since 2008! The quality of fangames has grown a lot, though MFGG still provides a space for short and wacky fangames too. More recently, I've made a bunch of upgrades to the site software and infrastructure to add new features, squash bugs, and improve performance and accessibility.

I don't really use the MFGG Discord - I'm a forums guy! I mostly use Discord for individual chats. Curiously, I've never used any of the Discord apps - I've only experienced Discord through the browser version.

Course clear! You got a card.

[NowhereMan]

So very much I would like to know, as I remember the boards had a very large and user-returning audience at all times, really. When did the forums start becoming inactive? I would like to use this topic a tribute to old MFGG, if I may, I might search for some of the stuff from the past and post them here.

[VinnyVideo]

I believe two major shifts contributed to the decrease in MFGG community activity:

1. The rise of commercial social media - especially Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. This didn't have much of an effect on MFGG as a fangaming resource, but it made it much harder to make MFGG a hangout.

2. The release of Mario Maker in 2015. Having a high-quality official level editor diverted a lot of interest from making fangames, and after that point, the rate of new members decreased. (Mario Maker also killed off the Hello Engine scene, which had both pros and cons.)

MFGG is still active, and I'm hopeful that people will grow tired of social media and decide that nonprofit forums are still really cool! Especially since every major social network delivers a worse user experience every year.

And yeah, feel free to post cool things from MFGG's past that you'd like to share! I always enjoy seeing that kind of thing.

Course clear! You got a card.

[NowhereMan]

So quick question, I was going to gather up some old material, are the MFGG archives no longer available?

[VinnyVideo]

By MFGG archives, I assume you mean the old IPB forums. It's funny you mention that - I had to disable them for a brief time last night because 10,000 (yes, really) bots were visiting that archive at the same time. This was causing everything on the MFGG server (the mainsite, the current forums, the Wiki, even things like NCFC) to slow to a crawl. MFGG has had some issues with overzealous bots before, but this is the craziest it's been.

But don't worry - the IPB archives still exist, and I'll get them accessible again this weekend.

Course clear! You got a card.