What other sega (or any retro-gaming) forums are out there? Are any surviving, or were we the last one? Which ones would you recommend should we need to find somewhere else to live?
When I first started out, I was on Eidolon's Tavern as well as this one. It seemed a lot of people were on both. After a while I stoped regularing the taven because it didn't require registration and started just getting tons and tons of spam.
I think that some of the (non-forum) content needs to be saved, as it's history we don't want to lose, like manual scans, old magazine ads, etc, and useful things like the translations.
My question is, what other sites on the interweb specialize in these areas? For instance, gamefaqs seems to be the king of reviews these days, so it might be best to just send all the reviews over there, rather than trying to duplicate it. I know vgmuseum has cover scans and screenshots. Are there any other defacto places that have manual scans, CD scans, old ads, or translations?
I'd be willing to host any of those things on my site, assuming the size and bandwidth isn't too hight (not like music or movies). I'm planning to make my own retro-video game section to my future website.
It's kind of like when the SegaBase died. Someone setup a mirror of it so we can continue visiting it. That site should never be lost. Those essays on the history of Sega consoles are just AMAZING. I've actually read through them all several times just for the joy of it, they're so well written, and the nostalgia of reliving those periods of my gaming life. And then of course it's the only place that has information on every single Sega CD game ever made.
There's a few things I have on my site now that are unique things that are from abandoned websites. For instance, I have the replacement video clips from the Tenchi Muyo screen saver. It's from like 10 years ago, but the video clips in the screen saver were accidentally done in a mac-only quicktime format, and I found a site long ago that had reencoded them so they work with a PC. Then that site went down, and I was the only only remaining place on the interweb to have them (for a while, AnimeNation.com linked to my site to download them). And then I have those Genesis, 32x, and 3DO hu-card manuals that I got off a website that was shut down (curiously it was shut down because the owner of the copyright on those old hu-cards shut them down...) but I felt they were beneficial to the community so I kept them.
Anyway, just some thoughts. Maybe it's best to just keep the forums (so we save the archive of useful information in old posts), but let other websites have the media, who already have a bigger collection of the media.
I agree too, that the drop in posts seemed rather sudden. The place was very active. And then all of a sudden, a week went by with no new posts, and then ever since then, it's been only sparse posting. I even thought about trolling sometimes just to spice things up.
I think the problem is that, besides the occasional new DC game or sega PS2 title, there's nothing new to talk about. Only old things to reminisce about, and we've already talked about all the old things already. It's like trying to think of something new to talk with your wife of 50 years about.
I think that we either need to expand a bit more (become a whole retro-gaming forum that equally represents sega, nintendo, atari, 3do, commadore, odyssey, etc) to capture a larger user base, and cross-infuse the posts. For instance, dont have a 3DO forum and a sega forum, Because only 3 people post in the 3DO forum. It's best to mix them together, so that people who only read the sega forum will occasionally browse some of the 3DO posts and might get intrigued.
It's kind of like on some of the Hermit Crab boards I'm a part of. The more "social" ones have fewer topics, so you're forced to browse through more threads and see other things you might not have otherwise thought were interesting. But some boards have split every single possible aspect of crab care into it's own separate topic, and it's just a pain to have to browse all the topics, especially since individually, they only get like 1 post a week, but combined we'd have more active traffic of dozens of posts a day.
I'm always willing to donate to a good cause. Reply saying you still need donations and the money ($50) is yours. 
