The Image Comics forums (and by extension, also the Savage Dragon forums)

http://forums.imagecomics.com/closed.php

The boards were notable in that Robert Kirkman was once a member as a fan of Savage Dragon, long before becoming famous for Walking Dead.

Hopefully someone will be able to archive threads from the boards.

I wonder why.

I noticed this the other day, I usually swing by when a new episode of Savage Dragon comes out. It's disappointing,

I think Kirkman was more active on the Dragon boards when they were part of the Savage Dragon website. I remember him as the guy who was always pimping his weird Battle Pope book, which I finally checked out when it was announced he was doing a Super Patriot book. That got me on the Kirkman train pretty early.

The boards haven't seemed especially busy for awhile, other than Kirkman's page.

I imagine they close because lack of traffic. Forums have become passe after the creation of social media.

Yeah, it's easier to use things like Facebook, Reddit, etc, then paying someone to maintain a specific forum for your product.

There used to be forums for Magic: The Gathering run by Wizards of the Coast, but they shut them down a few years ago (in fact, it was two years ago next month, here's the link https://magic.wizards.com/en/article...own-2015-09-16 )


I also think part of it was they didn't like the criticisms of their product. For instance, when they were releasing the new cards from the newest Magic set, they'd have an article talking about how awesome the card was, but in the forums everybody would tear it apart, showing how weak it was and such.

I think they got tired of that toxicity too.

I think a lot of companies don't like handling the more troublesome aspects of unmoderated forums. Even the most innocuous products and subjects need strong moderation on a message board, which means angering part of the customer base by default.

Comic forums are even worse because fans have very strong opinions about the characters that don't always align with the company's current direction. It's easier dumping fans off onto the larger social media sites.