I miss Disneysites!!

Today at work I found myself looking back on my Internet-history and longing to go back a few years and re-experience everything. The past 3-4 years I've often surfed the Internet and suddenly realized that I don't know what to do next and that I'm bored. That never used to be a problem, I never grew bored before, but I haven't had an answer to why that is until today.

I don't visit message boards/forums anymore.

And it hit my how much I miss it. The first real forums I joined was Disneysites!! (which must have been somewhere in 2001-2002) and it was such a wonderful feeling to find other people who had the same interest and passion in animated movies. When I joined I was about 12 or 13 years old, a time in my life when it wasn't really accepted to like Disney movies anymore, since they were "for kids". Thanks to the wonderful community at Disneysites, I realized that Disney was for everyone, no matter age. I made some really great friends there and spent virtually all of my free time on that site. Not only was I able to discuss all aspects of the movies I love; I learned so much more. One of the major things being my English skills. I remember the last few times when I visited Disneysites that I looked back at some of the first posts I made and cringed slightly because of the bad grammar/poor English in general. But despite that, no one ever made any remarks on my spelling; I was fully accepted from the beginning. Another major plus of the site was that there weren't just americans there, the members came from countries from all over the world resulting in great discussions about dubs and how different the translations sometimes were from the originals.

Through Disneysites I learned how to use PSP7 and edit my own graphics. I remember when the first so-called "PSP-avatars" showed up and I was in awe of how great they looked. I experimented a bit and learned how to make quite nifty avatars. This in turn prompted me to do a homepage where I put up all the avatars I made, and through this I learned basic HTML. Granted, my homepage was quite ugly from a design point-of-view, but just being able to do the page, with the hyperlinks and all was quite enough for me. One of the major highlights of my years at Disneysites was probably when the idea of the Animated Couples-website came up. I love the Animated Heroines-site and was happy to join the new project. The first few pages I did weren't that splendid, but I went back and remade them a year or so later and they actually turned out pretty good.

A lot of the people at Disneysites were also members on livejournal and when it was possible for everyone to make an account I jumped on the wagon. Although I mainly did it to see what the fuzz was about, it grew on me. Most of my posts were really trivial, but when I was really active here I made quite a few design for my page and even entered (and completed) a 100 icon challenge from Aristocats. During that process my PSP skills advanced even more and I even learned how to make animated icons.

At some point during my time at Disneysites I came across the PlanetZot forums. The site had been along for a year or so, but the forums were only a few months old and had very few members. The forums was dedicated to all kinds of animation, which I felt I had been missing at Disneysites, so I joined. The forums grew very very quickly and implemented a lot of cool features I hadn't seen before, like dynamic avatars with a shopping district where you could buy clothes for it and you got virtual money for every post you made. Roughly 3 months after joining I was asked if I wanted to become a moderator and I accepted. From that point on I started to spend more time on Zot than on Disneysites until I came to the point where I knew the Zot community a lot better than the one at Disneysites. From there on my visits to Disneysites became sporadic and Zot took up a lot of my time.

But for some reason that also changed.

Now I believe that it was the popularity of Facebook, Youtube and Wikipedia that slowly but surely drew my attention away. I started to visit Zot merely because I was a moderator (and because it had grown so big that the animation wasn't the focus of the discussions anymore) and then I no longer visited every day. Around the same time I gradually stopped blogging here (even though I had a Swedish blog for a while) and after some time Facebook took all attention.

The admin at PlanetZot didn't like where her forums were going either and after a year of it being her duty rather than something she did for her own enjoyment, she closed them down. Left today are only the animation discussion boards, but nothing of the community remains. After this decision I typed in disneysites.com in the search field for the first time in probably 2 years, only to find that the forums had been closed down there as well. I tried looking for forums about disney or animation in general on google but could only find message boards for the Disney parks.

This was almost a year ago. And today it really hit me how much I miss being a part of a community like that. I know some of the members from Disneysites created their own forums and I joined, but the activity there seems to be pretty low. So maybe this is just the way the internet is evolving: social media like Facebook and Twitter take up so much time that message boards and forums die out. I do spend a lot of time on Facebook, and I'm having a real good time while I'm doing it, but it's missing the heart and soul that was Disneysites and PlanetZot (during the times I visited the boards). Forums taught me so many valuable things and probably have a lot more to teach me. I just hope that I didn't come to this realization too late.