What We Learned Cataloguing 1,342 Forums

CardGarden — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:45:39 +0000

Every few months, someone announces that forums are dead. And every week, a search for some stubborn technical problem — an error code, a part number, a recipe that actually works — ends, three results down, on a forum thread from 2014 where a stranger solved it in detail and three others confirmed the fix.

Forums didn't die. They became invisible.

The modern web is organised for discovery through feeds and search rankings, and forums are bad at both. They don't chase trending topics. Their best content sits in old threads that search engines increasingly bury under AI summaries and content marketing. Communities moved, renamed, or quietly closed, and the link lists that once mapped them rotted where they stood. If you went looking for "a forum about X" today, you'd mostly find articles about forums — not the forums themselves.

We know, because we went looking. CardGarden started as an attempt to rebuild the map: find the forums that still exist, check that they're alive, and organise them so a person can actually browse. The catalogue currently holds 1,342 listings — forums in English, Russian and from around the world, plus the AI tools, domain registrars and hosting providers that forum people kept asking us about.

Cataloguing them taught us more about the state of the open web than we expected. This is what we found.

How the catalogue was built

We started from seed lists, followed links forum-to-forum, and checked each site was actually alive before it earned a place. Every listing is categorised by language — English, Russian, or global — and by topic. The forum section is 134 communities. Around it sit the reference sections forum people kept asking for: 92 AI tools, 78 domain registrars, and 1,038 hosting, VPN and proxy providers.

That last number surprised us too. But it makes sense: the people who run and use forums are the same people constantly buying a VPS, moving a domain, or looking for a proxy provider — so the catalogue grew where the questions were.

Finding 1: link rot is the default state of the web

The hard part of building a directory is not finding listings. It is that a meaningful share of them are dead, parked, or redirected within a year — quietly, with no announcement.

Our working method: automated reachability checks on a schedule, but a human pass before anything is removed. A site that fails a check at 3am during maintenance is not a dead site, and deleting a live community because of one bad night is worse than carrying a dead link a little longer.

The lesson for anyone building a resource page: budget for maintenance, not collection. A directory that only grows is quietly becoming wrong.

Finding 2: the non-English forum web is thriving — and invisible

Of the 134 forums in the catalogue, 55 are Russian-language and 27 are global or regional communities that English-language search rarely surfaces. There are entire scenes — with their own experts, archives and in-jokes — that you will simply never see if you only search in English.

Forums didn't shrink evenly across the web. In much of the world they never stopped being the default place to ask a serious question.

Finding 3: niche forums beat social groups on depth

A decade-old troubleshooting thread has something a Discord server or a Facebook group struggles to match: it is findable, it stays put, and the answer is the whole thread — the failed attempts included. Social groups are better for conversation in the moment; forums are better for knowledge that needs to still be there in five years.

Cataloguing both kinds of community, the pattern was consistent: the deeper the niche, the more likely the real expertise still lives on a forum.

Finding 4: a directory is only as good as its pruning

Adding listings is the easy, satisfying part. The actual product is the pruning: re-checking, removing what has died, and adding what owners tell us we missed. We also learned a search lesson the hard way — casual visitors browse categories, returning visitors search — so the site ended up needing both, with a client-side search index over all 1,342 listings so search stays instant without a backend. That works at this size. At ten times the catalogue, it would be a real problem, and we'd have to rethink it.

What we'd do differently

We'd build the freshness signals in from day one — a visible "last checked" on listings — instead of treating maintenance as invisible work. And we'd start the owner-submission route earlier: the best corrections and additions have come from the people who run the communities themselves.

The map is the point

Forums are still where the internet keeps its long memory. They just need a map. CardGarden is ours — free to browse, no signup: https://cardgarden.eu.cc

If you run a forum we haven't found, or find one we've listed that has moved, tell us. The map gets better the same way the forums did: one person at a time, in public.

— CardGarden (the people who built and run the site)

DEV Community: CardGarden