I was wondering who our elder forums are.
How old is your forum?
How did your forum get started?
Provide a short history of your forum software. Where did you start, and when did you come to Discourse?
How many members have been active since your first year?
My forum LotusElan.net will be 23 years old this April. The community has existed since 1999.
We started in 1999 as a ONElist mail group. ONElist was purchased by eGroups and then purchased by Yahoo Groups. In 2003, we started our forum using Invision and migrated to phpBB version 2 in 2005. In 2025 we moved over to Discourse.
We still have 121 active members from our first year.
Actually my history with Discourse begin with this community 6 years ago but my own instance has almost 2 years
I did my praised my personal experience here:
I am so pround and glad with my instance and I just can be thankful to CDCK for that.
How old is your forum? MineralRightsForum began November 2009 - online 16 yrs now
How did your forum get started? Simple hunch that there was a need.
Provide a short history of your forum software. Where did you start, and when did you come to Discourse? Started with Ning, migrated to Discourse in May 2018. An excellent move.
How many members have been active since your first year? Great question. I’d estimate several hundred.
The Magicball Netwok is 25.5 years old (October 2000). Actually a bit older as before that I had a temporary forum online for a few months, but that history is gone.
I started the forum not long after I bought a computer which I could run as a server on my university provider internet connection. The forum was running on vBulletin (final version 3.8) for 24 years until I migrated to Discourse, which took me about a year to prepare as I working on an improved import script for vB 3.
I created the forum to move an existing community which existed on the InsideTheWeb forums since 1997. InsideTheWeb had many problems and even died not long after I created the new forum.
I is not really a big forum and active forum, the subject is rather niche: a video game series which had a release in 1994 and 1997; and eventually a remake in 2024. It is still visited by a bunch of people I met online in 1997, and new people which have we’ve picked up along the way.
Originally I had no plan to migrate the forum away from the ancient vBulletin 3.8 install. The forum’s activity was decreasing a lot given the subject manner and the likes of Facebook keeping people in that ecosystem. Effort to keep vBulletin running while PHP kept introducing new problems with the old codebase kept increasing. Paying money to migrate to a newer vBulletin seemed like a waste, also vB 4 and leter were not really better forums, as they tried to pivot to a social network. I had already decided years before that if I would migrate to different software I would migrate to Discourse.
I think somewhere in 2018 I installed Discourse as an internal forum at work as a place where consultants to workout, discuss, and vote for certain product improvements which me might eventually put on a roadmap. (Unless a customer was footing the bill for the development.) But that plan never worked out. But I loved the setup of Discourse, and the fact that it was open source.
My forum, self-hosted discourse since October 2018, descends from a G+ community started December 2012. We’ve presently got 160 monthly active users.
My forum was established nine months ago.
Though the number of active users is modest, it possesses a certain charm.
This forum was created to facilitate discussions about the game server I operate.