Fwoosh Toys/Articulated Icons - A Retrospective

Misfit said:
One of these days it’s going to go down and not come back.
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Is anyone on here still visiting the site regularly, or at all?

I slowly stopped going there once I found this place after the last down time. Then a couple months ago I stopped completely after one of the Haslabs I was tracking on both sites ended. Haven't been back since.
 
I check in at Fwoosh once every great while and it's definitely slowed way down. Barely any traffic and at least half or more of the people still bothering to post there already post here as well. It's certainly possible Fwoosh will go back up, but if it does I don't know how many more times it will go up. Pabs has already said he'll run it 'while it's profitable.' In other words, once the traffic doesn't get him any ad revenue, the site will go down one day and never come back.

I do not very much get the feeling that Fwoosh is any longer a labour of love for him, if it ever was.
 
I popped in Thursday or Friday as I do occasionally out of morbid curiosity — it's also still one of my shortcuts — and it was up and running. I think one of the Marvel topics showed recent activity but literally nothing else.
 
I might have posted there for another week after being directed here, but since then I pretty much stopped. I know I clicked on my old bookmark once by accident and it looked like there had been no activity on most of the forum apart from the Marvel board.
 
I almost immediately changed my home button from Fwoosh to AT. Once I did that, I only went to Fwoosh very intentionally and very rarely. And yeah, Marvel still got some posts every day, I think. Maybe three or four other threads had activity at least once a week. Everything else was less than once a week. It was definitely full ghost town mode.
 
It's like that mall in town that only has a 90s Kings of Comedy type suit store in it, a few cell phone case kiosks, and a run down Charley's Subs and Auntie Anne's Pretzel's in the food court.

It's just on that slow march to death, but we all know it's coming.
 
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Speaking of dead forums I still check in from time to time on Joecanuck.com.

It is a Canadian GI Joe forum that has been around for over 20 years. It makes the Fwoosh look like Times Square on New Year's Eve. There are threads on there that haven't had a post in over a decade. There are about 3 threads that get any sort of regular posting, and even that can be few and far between. I just can't quit it due to all the memories and I am glad the owner sold to a forum member years ago who was dedicated to keeping it going even though it has almost no traffic and no revenue.

It is sad to see of course because I remember the heydays when they would hold conventions (anyone remember the HATE set? Chromed HISS tank set), other exclusive figures, trading cards, newsletters and fandom interaction with a Joecanuck figure traveling the world (as posted by fans). Man to go from those days to what it is now..........
 
I gave up on the Fwoosh once the log in stopped working. It may well have been because I have a bunch of extensions for privacy and to prevent ads and scripts breaking the already flaky fabric of the forum but it just stopped being worth the effort anyway.

I do love forums though, I'm not a fan of the way they've been replaced/abandoned in the main.

Another board I've been on for over 20 years now is one of some online pals and acquaintances. It started as a very cliquey UK games industry spin off from a leading magazine (one of the few still actually in print today), running out of a mate's old server somewhere on an ancient version of phBB. They never bothered to properly upgrade it though so it's become more and more antiquated over time and a couple of years back, almost everyone decamped to Discord instead (which I loathe). Eventually I caved and went over after the rest kept pleading but the Discord way of doing things sucks balls and you just know it's going to enshitten itself out of use sooner rather than later and then everything's lost. There's still one hold out left on the old board, they hate Discord even more than I do and will still post something every month or so...which kind of works for most of us because he's an incredibly annoying contrarian word salad generator. But he's a mate so what can you do, etc.
 
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