According to YK the NWN forum is gone for good(see the last instagram post he made). To me the worst thing about that is the huge wealth of information over 11 - 12 years that is just gone(I don't know if a cache'd version of the site is somehow possible). Other than that this was by far the most active metal board I knew of, in fact I don't even know of any other than here and surprisingly this one is not very active. Is the message board turning into a thing of the past or something? I honestly have no idea. Please post other forums you visit or seem to be quite active, thanks.

Reddit has largely killed off BBS-style forums, or at least stopped them from expanding. Which is a shame, because that format and community prioritizes jokes and hot takes over actual discussion, not to mention threads pretty much die after 12 hours. Fun fact: I was banned from r/metal from posting this exact comment there.

As far as I know this site and NWN are/were the only general metal forums with a decent amount of active users. Meshuggah's forum used to be fucking massive, and Jari used to post on the Wintersun one regularly, but those appear to be dead.

Where did YK say that? I can only see that Veterans Day post...
But damn, that's a shame. Someone should start another forum called Unclear War Now or something, for familiarity and for old times sake.

It's in the replies of that post.

And that's too bad about forums/reddit, the older I get the more I cannot stand that smarmy internet humour.

I do remember there was a Japanese metal forum that was promoted on the NWN board, don't know if anyone from here also posts on it.

The whole format of /r/metal renders the sub pointless. Low quality vid post after vid post. Least engaged community I've encountered in 20 years of the internet.

Yeah the few times I've found myself there I've seen exactly that.

The Ultimate Metal forum used to be pretty active, it's been so long since I've been there I've no idea anymore though.

Forums are dead and there is no good substitute. Sorry.

shame, i used NWN forum as well as this one, though NWN was way more active. as people have said /r/metal is just for posting videos really, not a lot of discussion there.

NWN was an incredible resource. Sad to see Yosuke has decided to kill it for good. Next time you see whiny children complaining about "problematic" bands you can thank them.

The one I post at the most is the Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles forum.

https://www.braveboard.org

I am on JMF. It was spawned off a thread I started here on Japanese metal and most of the regular posters migrated to there. It's pretty busy.

I've noticed a drop in posts here lately, and UltimateMetal is dead, dead, dead.

Ironic that the annual NWN festival is titled Never Surrender.

As several people have commented, reddit seems to have replaced forums as the main platform for online discussion, perhaps disqus-type platforms for blog commenting as well, although the blog format is not as big these days as it was some years ago, either.
What I'm not so sure is that reddit attracts the sime kind of public as forums like the NWN forum or this one does (did?). Personally I think the reddit format of nested comments is an absolute pain to navigate and a huge hindrance to fluent discussion or just reading a topic sequentially like in a regular forum. I think it's bad to the extent that I don't feel like engaging with it, and I think this is a common view among users of old-style forums, so if there is no user overlap with reddit my guess would be that's the reason why.

Hundreds of people complain about the death of the forum in favor of Reddit. Another board will come, just be patient.

Hopefully Yosuke will eventually at least archive it so future people can trawl through it, sort of like the old Full Moon Productions forum (which I could swear there was some way to access, but I can't figure it out right atm). Discord seems to be a pretty popular metal discussion place at the moment, although I haven't really found a channel I really like (except the Metal Archives one, which is sort of like an extension of this forum). There's also the metal general discussion and annual NBBMN on that-site-who-shall-not-be-named. I've looked at the Metal-Fi forum, and it seems like the What are you listening to right now? topic has a pretty continuous amount of discussion, mostly on newer releases. I wonder if the NWN regulars have migrated anywhere.


And the reason you think this is...?

BM labels need a plateform like that to promote their releases and as I said, hundreds of people wait for it, so I guess another board will be created...

Metal should be dangerous! For other people though. I want my forum to be a safe space for right wing posters. Fuck safe spaces though, those are for posers.

Nothing of value was lost. Move on.

Other metal forums? This one right here but I have a feeling the question some people are really asking is "other metal forums where slurs, racism, mysoginistic comments and promoting nazi bands is allowed?".

The platform you are speaking of is social media (FB/insta). I do hope another board is created for underground labels to promote their stuff, because the discussion that circled around that was often good, but I don't necessarily think it will happen anytime soon. Forums could just be going the way of tape-trading and fanzines, only kept alive by a few people for nostalgia.

This board really should be a lot more active than what it is (like Metal Rules was years ago).

what are the best reddits for metal. i am on reddit but rarely use it for much. would like to have a dip into it for metal.
i prefer forums though

It's sad what happened to that board in the last years of existence.

I remember discovering a lot of stuff by way of that board, even if a lot of people there had tastes which leaned towards glam/hair stuff as opposed to the death metal or thrash metal that I tend to listen to. (Not only that, but much of the time, it wasn't even just the Dokken/Mötley Crüe type stuff, but bands like Poison, Bon Jovi, and other bands closer to that which the posters there listened to.)

In the last years, there was a noticeable dip in posts, which does happen to some places, and then spambots flooded the place. The moderators very rarely ever posted there in the 2010s. If perhaps they had less time on their hands at this point that they did in previous years, they should have handed the keys over to someone else to be a moderator.

Around mid-2016 or so, there were maybe five or six regular posters left. Then the spambots ran the few remaining people off of there, and the board consisted of nothing but spambots for the remaining time. The message board finally shut down (I guess someone finally alerted the people who run the site, which still updates, though I don't visit it) in mid-2018. They didn't restart a new board, it's gone completely. Given that about a year and a half has passed, I doubt they'll ever start a new one again. Plus, most message boards from the 2000s that are still active aren't as busy as they were in the 2000s.

I remember I used to post at the less busy No Official Capacity, which ran from about 2004 until about 2015, although only a few people were regular posters in the last days of the forum (2012-2015).

There was also UberMetal back in the 2000s.

Lol, I started posting on metal rules when the Iron Maiden forum went fanclub only. It was fun and this place seemed too elitist for my mainstream tastes back then. But it slowly died out and I migrated over here eventually. but communities are dying out in favor of the noise of reddit or facebook.

I love a lot of Japanese bands so I just registered, cheers.




Well that is not what I was asking at all and none of the replies are promoting anything like that either.

I was just watching a video yesterday which detailed why the Golden Age of the Internet is over. Forums dying was part of it. Our favorite places to post and discuss the weird alternative stuff we like is just another big massive move in consolidating the whole internet under one big corporate umbrella.

I used to have so much fun being a part of goth.net and the Kind Diamond Coven forums. I did have an account on metal-rules as well, but I must have joined up at a bad time. A lot of the posters were assholes, in my opinion. Some guys like Ray From Hell and Vic were alright.

So true.

I have many theories about why that is so.

That's hilarious to me.

I'll always stick to this, old school of online community where you can take your time, sit down with the cup of coffee, and slowly scroll and read all the posts without any real-time jumpers and intruders. It's like an old ritual!

Jeez...my 500th post!

I started off on usenet groups, forums were for pussies. Vic used to post on alt.net.slayer and there were some good guys there but they were what forums are now, dying off when I was just getting into them.

I've got to beg to differ on that. While I didn't agree with the moderation policy and sure as shit don't dig NSBM/RAC, That was a small handful of posters pushing that shit and easily ignored. The value of the other 90% of content was certainly not inconsiderable. Something about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

While that may be true, Yosuke did absolutely nothing to curtail that type of behavior, so his complicity in it is damning in and of itself. Sucks for the rest of the forum as you say, but that is why leadership needs to be accountable.

I agree forums are dead. I'm not sure if they've ever been "a thing". There are thousands and thousands of metal fans worldwide. I just saw Amon Amarth headline for a couple thousand people - place was packed. I remember thinking how odd it was given the number of fans that message boards get so little activity. Even this forum sometimes goes days without anything contributed. You'd think there'd be a ton of people who would want to discuss this amazing music.

There are. And forums used to be huge. Even the most specific niche forums could get as much traffic as this one does now. Eventually that guy Tom had the idea to take all the people from all those thousands of forums and put them in one place. He failed pretty badly. But then his evil twin Mark picked up that idea and developed it further.

I think it's a little more complex than that. There was some pretty tight moderation in terms of stopping topics straying away from music-as-music and into politics. Which meant that you could, for example, have a thread promoting some idiot band's release or asking for NSBM recommendations, but a topic about politics without reference to a particular musical release would be nuked immediately. So we start to get into some questions about why, if as you say "nothing of value was lost", I can run a quick search and find 575 bands with "national socialism" as the lyrical theme here on the archives? By including that information here is that viewpoint being promoted, and are the mods responsible for that? Or is information delivered by 3rd parties without comment neutral? Everyone will have a different answer to those, but let's at least be clear it was a long way from being Stormfront, which I can say with confidence after posting these for a solid 13 years.

There were tons of users there that expressed blatant hate speech over and over again that never got dealt with over the course of many years, so excuse me if I disagree that it's all that complicated.

So? It's just up to the personal modding styles of the community whether that kind of stuff gets banned or not. And then people can gravitate to some communities or others depending on whether they jive with that community organization and rule structure or not. That's kinda just how people work. Saying that Yosuke is "complicit" in promoting bigoted ideals is a vague and silly accusation.

What do you mean, "so?" The "so" is evident in the very fact that the forum is shut down now, due to reasons that have everything to do with what I just pointed out.

There's nothing vague or silly about it; he was aware of many of his users' desire to promote hate speech right on his forum and did nothing about it for years. Not sure why anyone is surprised there would be any kind of blowback about it.

Are you going to elaborate or are you just going to smugly vaguepost?

(Here, I'll help you: social media and reddit killed most traditional forums. It's not just in metal, it's the case for almost every community. Just the cycle of life really.)


I dare say anyone with a brain understands the difference between hosting a database of encyclopedic information vs. letting slurs and hate speech fester inside a community. Thankfully. Which would also be why a Wikipedia article about 8chan or Stormfront is not the same thing as actually being those places. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hell I'm not even trying to place a judgment on the situation; just explaining the natural sequence of events. Don't let a place get run to shit over years and maybe you won't get such a harsh blowback from people who are tired of NS/fascism/bigotry. I mean, we sometimes get users on *this site* who post shit like that. Wonder why it's still up and running without controversy? We (the admins) fucking ban them.

And Discord (and others like it) are about to finish the job.