It's crazy to think that less than three days from now, the McLeodGaming Forums are gonna be closed for good. I was never crazy active on the forums and only really posted to ask a question from time to time, but I've still seen a lot here and can acknowledge that this place is pretty damn significant as far as McLeodGaming is concerned.

The forums are a real piece of history. Counting the old forums, it opened up way back in 2005, when McLeodGaming itself was just a small website with one guy behind it who made TI-83 Plus calculator games (I'm still waiting for the lost ones to come back btw) and some mildly edgy Flash animations. The forums are where Cleod9 announced that he was turning his Sonic fan game into his own Super Smash Bros. game made in Flash, and when that game took off, the forums are where development on the sequel started up and took place for many years. That game is now one of the biggest fan games in history with its own dedicated website, it's getting hundreds of thousands of plays every day, and McLeodGaming itself has over 100k subscribers on YouTube, and it's not until now that the forums are finally letting go.

In all that time, the forums have served as the place for the McLeodGaming and SSF2 communities. As I'm writing this, there are 25,921 registered members of the forums and I do wonder how many more will join before the end of the month. For a while, every single MG news post was posted here for people to discuss. SSF2 discussions, bug reports, Q&A's, records, screenshots, and speculation were always happening here, which is to say nothing of the competitive scene that exploded here. This is where countless tournaments were announced and held, the meta developed like crazy, and every tier list up until now was made public; in fact, the original Smash Flash Backroom used to just be a sub-forum here. This place is where plenty of people got into the SSF2 community for the first time and are still very active players.

SSF2 aside, this was just a great community in general. Again, I wasn't all too active here, but based on the fact that there was apparently a radio show here I'd like to assume it was something special. Friends were made, fun was had, art and music were shared, games were played, role-plays were done, contests were held... even after McLeodGaming's social network accounts started to take off and the official Discord server grew bigger, this place was still crazy active with people discussing all sorts of things with each other.

With all that being said, I totally see why this place is closing. I don't wanna say phpBB boards are completely a thing of the past, but this website does not feel modern at all and I think stuff like Discord is just much more viable. I also can't verify Cleod9's claims about the security here but it's exploding with scam bots so I'll take his word. The logo lacks the flat colors of the new MG logo, the smiles haven't been updated since 2018 (long live ), and although this place has a lot of active users, I think it's only worth keeping around for so long before they finally move on. This place was bound to get abandoned eventually.

I look forward to the forums getting archived in a read-only format, since there's a lot of history to be found here. However, I also hope that the team takes it a step forward and archives everything they have access to. Old OG forums aside, Doq brings up a good point that there's an entire segment of this site's history from 2014 to 2017 that we just don't have access to whatsoever. I dunno what exactly we're not authorized to see, but my stance is that if it's not breaking the forum rules and it's not leaking anything then it deserves public preservation. Thankfully, Cleod9 has expressed interest in doing that, so I have my fingers crossed for this.

So, I think I've made this post long and corny enough. I might drop in a couple more times while I still have the chance but I wanted to let this in particular out before it was too late. This place was great, and I'm gonna miss whatever time I spent here. So in its final hours, I'm hopeful that everyone here will give it the time it deserves, one last hurrah to the website that brought together and defined a whole community for over a decade.

Thank you for everything, McLeodGaming Forums. Adieu.











December 4, 2005 – April 30, 2020

pce