Stilt Village
GBA
I was vaguely aware of the creation of Famiboards, because I've lurked ResetERA pretty consistently since its creation, and GAF before that. Never actually had any inclination to join either of them, because the standard of discussion was... more or less non-existent. You could have an interesting, high effort topic, but the norm was that it was common knowledge that many people posting hadn't read the rest of the thread (maybe the last few posts), the OP, or sometimes even the title properly. Despite not seeming to have much in the way of any standards whilst still holding itself as some exclusive bastion of rational discussion (ooh, I need a paid email, well la-di-da), Era is somehow poorly run enough that it keeps driving off entire communities en masse with its decisions, which I think is funny.
The reason I hung around these sites in the first place is as a news aggregate. Being someone who doesn't use social media at all, or even watch television, this is basically how I hear about everything. I actually enjoyed reading the Smash Era threads though, so I was already very familiar with anyone who was a regular in those when I came here, though none of them probably know me.
I actually hail from DK Vine, as one of the last members from the old days still active and not banned for being insane, albeit just barely "old". I lurked for 2-4 years before I worked up the courage to finally participate, armed with the knowledge of a decade plus of weird in-jokes and esoteric community knowledge. Then about a year after I joined, there was a conscious effort by the site to clean up its image and transform into a modern hub for Rare fandom in the wake of Rare Replay, shedding the last vestiges of its angry buyout era identity as the site that did a poetry slam in protest of Donkey Konga. There were a lot of growing pains with doing so, I won't get into it. Things eventually stabilized as a lot of the more troublesome members were gradually banned, and it's been mostly quiet for some time now.
The DK Vine forum went down back in April for a while, but it took a week or two for me to even find out, because the site had been getting less and less active for some time, mostly on account of... Yeah... Anyway, I think most of my awareness of Famiboards came from the Donkey Kong rumors being shared back and forth across the sites around that time, and I ended up deciding to join in a sort of life boat situation and also because I had been feeling a bit frustrated by my constraints on DK Vine. There's only so many times you can go in-depth on a subject and be confronted with the fact that your reach is limited to like two people because the userbase is so small and specific. I like quite a few of the remaining longtime members there, but most of them are a lot older than me and have better things to do these days than hang around a forum for a dead game series, so it's not much of a community at the moment anyway. And there's not really anything for it but to hope they make a new Donkey Kong game... Any time now...
