View Full Version : What are some of the oldest "gun talk" forums?
I recall spending much time on "firearmstalk" or "shooterstalk" "shootersforum" or some such title in the 1990's.
everready73
10-22-20, 19:58
When I first got into guns I was on The HighRoad forum. I think it had been doing for a while
Just looked and it started in 2002.
Light fighter is also pretty old I think
Diamondback
10-22-20, 20:14
Gunhub has gone through multiple names over the years, but its nucleus was the old Prodigy Shooting Sports BBS and then several other threads including BattleRifles wove into the tapestry.
Quiet place but a VERY high Signal-to-Noise Ratio when its members speak, and a treasure trove in the archives, particularly on the M1 Carbine and M14. Pat Sweeney is an alum over there, quite a few retired or approaching-retirement LEOs and military over there too.
BoringGuy45
10-22-20, 20:26
Not specifically gun talk forums, but I started on the Military.com weapons sub forum back when I was a teen in the early 2000s :laugh:. I didn't know dick, and neither did any of them.
Diamondback
10-22-20, 20:51
Not specifically gun talk forums, but I started on the Military.com weapons sub forum back when I was a teen in the early 2000s :laugh:. I didn't know dick, and neither did any of them.
Whelp! :p I was a 20something college student at that time... which is when I was active at THR and first joined 1911Forum, what's now Gunhub, the Iannamicos' MG board and the long-defunct AWBanSunset.com.
FromMyColdDeadHand
10-22-20, 21:18
What is 'old' pre2000? Pre-1995? Before there were pictures and a 1200 baud modem was the envy of 300 baud buddies?
The High Road and 1911forum and of course ARF were some of the oldest I remember. Brian Enos seems like it may have started out of a list serv.
I wasn't early, but I was surprised at how many places I could get FromMyColdDeadHand as a name.
Is Sigforum still alive? Google finds it, but it won't open.
FalFiles traces its history back to the 90s BBS days
Long before forums was usenet... talk.politics.guns, rec.guns, etc. Mid 80s
24hourcampfire is from 2000.
I know Calguns started just after THR.
But yeah, THR has been around long enough to have had to fight it out being taken over using registry shenanigans.
For some reason I think that Brian Enos forums go back a ways.
Sent from 80ms in the future
In 1995 I was a junior in high school and was on the Vollmer’s forum and Subguns forum. Machinegun News had a forum that was gone by about 1996. Biggerhammer and Sturmgewehr popped up shortly thereafter, maybe around 96/97. Then HK Pro. Then ARFCOM.
I was first interested in reading about, discussing, and following prices of transferable machineguns in high school and college. Really, it’s still what interests me the most.
I think it was 1999 when I first found HK91.com which I think was run by the same folks that ran FalFiles.
The first gun forum I was ever active on was Gunsnet/AK47.net back in like 2000/2001. The site has gone through a couple of iterations due to server issues and I think maybe a hack attack at one point, and I pretty much stopped posting there like a decade ago, but I’m always amazed by the fact that every time I pop back in there out of curiosity, I still recognize almost all of the usernames from way back in the early days. They seem to have very little turnover in membership. The old ones are still active and very few new people join.
I'd forgotten about rec.guns
FromMyColdDeadHand
10-23-20, 07:56
I'd forgotten about rec.guns
Before the internet truism that there is a 'porn' type for everything, there was an alt.rec.**** group for everything it seemed...
landrvrnut22
10-23-20, 08:14
One of the oldest I have been a part of is called Guns and Rovers. It was started by Art Bitterman, of Aardvark Arms, a small old school gunsmith shop in North Carolina. Art was quite a guy and loved guns and old Land Rovers. The forums is still alive and well, but Art passed away due to a stroke in 2009. I've been a member there since about 2000, thought have been somewhat inactive. http://gunsandrovers.com/forum.php
TheAlsatian
10-23-20, 08:16
I had dabbled on a few gun forums prior to deploying to Afghanistan in 2001, but lost those log ins. When I came back to Montana, I wasnt that interested in the tactical type forums. I mostly hung out at the 24 hour campfire and the SASS Wire. I also did keep an eye on Sturmgewehr.com.
Nightvisionary
10-23-20, 09:12
Vollmer's paintball and machine gun board was the first one I remember around 1996. Subguns popped up about the same time Volmer shut down. When AR15 and FALfiles started they did not have forums, they just had specs and a few articles. I grew to hate Buddy Hinton on Sturmgewehr, his $5 "Free lunch" program, constant browbeating, and the complicated ballet unicycle riding blindfolded while juggling steps you had to do in just the right order, with just the right format, while also meeting the unwritten format rules of which any violation would result in the instant deletion without warning of carefully crafted sale ads. Posting an ad there was like trying to crack a 4 digit cipher lock while knowing half the numbers because if your ad got deleted you never knew why so you had to guess and try again until you got it right. It was not even his board yet he was raking in thousands of dollars from his "Free Lunch" program. I think the program finally came to a sudden halt after somebody turned Buddy in to the IRS for un-reported income tax violations. Buddy single handedly killed that board.
I recall Assaultweb being Gunsnet’s “nemesis” back in the old days. I never used the forum but AW was generally portrayed by the OG gunsnetters as a breeding ground for kooks, and whenever someone would register on Gunsnet and start engaging in dumbassery or spouting off the wall conspiracy theories they were often dismissed as an “Asswebber” if I remember correctly.
Ol’ Gunsnet had its own cast of characters though. Among them aspiring ATF agent and all-around hate-sink Peacemaker, fraudulent Russian paratrooper DesantnikVDV, pro-gun leftist LAGC, and “worlds biggest Obama supporter” Igor Vovkovinskiy (yes that Igor Vovkovinskiy, tallest living person in the US) and some others whose names now escape me and will remain lost to the mists of time....
Grand58742
10-23-20, 11:11
Was Gecko45 exclusively on Glocktalk? That dude was a hoot.
And who could forget Gunkid on the survival boards? Tactical Wheelbarrow will eternally live in infamy.
I honestly didn’t really participate in gun forums until 2010. In the early 00s, I might have looked up stuff on Yahoo. But really I wasn’t that much into guns like that. Just what I was taught in academy or classes and such.
Honestly if anything I would read Shotgun News, Small Arms Review, or Soldier of Fortune(stopped reading SoF circa 2000 though because I wasn’t an edgy teen anymore).
I might have read a few Guns magazines for toilet fodder. The usual uptalk of 1911s, some caliber argument, Mossad Ayoob acting like the Jesus Christ of Police, but usually the pretty pictures.
Honestly I was either into the underground music scene or the anime scene in the 90s; both of which have gotten lame.
Before enlightenment I had a Glock and an AR.
After enlightenment, I had a Glock and an AR
I honestly didn’t really participate in gun forums until 2010. In the early 00s, I might have looked up stuff on Yahoo. But really I wasn’t that much into guns like that. Just what I was taught in academy or classes and such.
Honestly if anything I would read Shotgun News, Small Arms Review, or Soldier of Fortune(stopped reading SoF circa 2000 though because I wasn’t an edgy teen anymore).
I might have read a few Guns magazines for toilet fodder.
Same exact experience. Would look stuff up when I needed to but otherwise didn't know places like this existed. Think I found forums around 2009. Unit then I didn't even know most of the brands even. I knew Beretta but not 92. Vaguely knew Glock but not all the different models. I shot a short one in 9mm!! My first gun and first carry gun was a Ruger P95 in 2001.
ARs were ARs, shotguns were excellent home defense because they had knock down power and that noise they make when racking and AKs were the shit!!
Sent from my moto z4 using Tapatalk
Nightvisionary
10-23-20, 14:30
Last week I found an old email from around 2006 from someone named "Boom" telling me to come sign up at this new website called m4carbine.net. I did but I think my account info was permanently lost during a site upgrade sometime around 2009-2010.
Was Gecko45 exclusively on Glocktalk? That dude was a hoot.
And who could forget Gunkid on the survival boards? Tactical Wheelbarrow will eternally live in infamy.
Gecko45 was actually Juggernaut on arfcom. SpecOps was HKocher I think, trying to remember. Met Geck at Shot Show in Orlando when he was hanging out with the Cav Arms crew.
Grand58742
10-23-20, 17:55
Gecko45 was actually Juggernaut on arfcom. SpecOps was HKocher I think, trying to remember. Met Geck at Shot Show in Orlando when he was hanging out with the Cav Arms crew.
You have to tell that story.
Diamondback
10-23-20, 17:59
And who could forget Gunkid on the survival boards? Tactical Wheelbarrow will eternally live in infamy.
AKA multi-time convicted felon John Melvin Davis... oh, that's a blast from the past. I watched multiple boards throw him out multiple times and he kept coming back like the Clap from Hell...
The_War_Wagon
10-23-20, 18:06
The Minion Report was the first board I joined - I WISH I could remember my log-in there - it seems to still be going! :(
FerFal was a regular there, and reading his first-hand accounts of Argentina's collapse was worth the price of admission. I joined in '06, I think, but that site has been around since at least '02, IIRC.
M4C was about the 4th board I joined; it's now the oldest one I'm still an active member of.
I think I still have my High Road login. I didn't pay attention to forums until around 2009.
Vollmer's paintball and machine gun board was the first one I remember around 1996. Subguns popped up about the same time Volmer shut down. When AR15 and FALfiles started they did not have forums, they just had specs and a few articles. I grew to hate Buddy Hinton on Sturmgewehr, his $5 "Free lunch" program, constant browbeating, and the complicated ballet unicycle riding blindfolded while juggling steps you had to do in just the right order, with just the right format, while also meeting the unwritten format rules of which any violation would result in the instant deletion without warning of carefully crafted sale ads. Posting an ad there was like trying to crack a 4 digit cipher lock while knowing half the numbers because if your ad got deleted you never knew why so you had to guess and try again until you got it right. It was not even his board yet he was raking in thousands of dollars from his "Free Lunch" program. I think the program finally came to a sudden halt after somebody turned Buddy in to the IRS for un-reported income tax violations. Buddy single handedly killed that board.
Yeah, Sturm was a PITA. It never had the level of discussion that Vollmers and Subguns had, but it was a good place to buy. FYI, the old school subguns is resurrected as snugbus.com. Not nearly as active as the original subguns, before Frank Goepfert bought and tanked it, but still enjoyable.
Also, the new Sturm is not at all affiliated with Buddy. It’s still quite good for buying and selling.
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