I believe that forums and bulletin boards have been around for ages, and actually it has been the first form of Social Networks, so it never actually was a thing of late in the root essence.
4 awesome forums I frequent are:
- Systemshock Forums
- Very much techies and programmers, primarily South African base with frequent competitions and events.
- The v7 Network – Web Development Community
- I visited this forum when I had more time to read and when I just started out in web development and SEO.
- Metastorm e-work BPM forums by Processmapping.com.au
- I used this forum for all my product support and help whilst working with the Metastorm BPM software.
- Digitalpoint Forums
- This is also a very nice forum for webmaster, web developers in general. I also features an adsense sharing model, where you provide your Adsense ID on your profile, and displays Adsense ads ‘as’ you in topics where you are active. I’ve actually made a few dollars for just being active in this forum. This is a great initiative to encourage activity in the forums.