Gametalk.com

Gametalk.com
Gametalk.com is a website created by Mike Pooler in Febuary 1997. It is a collection of forums about games that you can post on. It has a unique system of not logging on permenantly, but just entering in your name and password every time you post. Unfortunately, passwords were not mandatory, which led to some users getting impersonated.

Gametalk 2.0 is supposedly coming soon, but users have been waiting much longer than expected for the forums to be up again. It was officially stated to be up and running on October 15th, 2008, but never did, with a different message on the front page each day. Recently, a "This page cannot be displayed" page has appeared on any of GameTalk's pages, including GameTalk2.0's main page, leaving some mystery as to whether it will ever return.

In early 2009, a sequel version of the site called GametalkX.0(GTX0) was built by long time Gametalk user, Shane Xhin. This site is still operational and can be found at www.gtx0.com. While not as busy or popular as the original, many former Gametalk users found their way to the new site, bringing back the same community feeling for a short while. Xhin planned to end the "Gametalk" era once and for all by relaunching GTX0 on a much larger scale under the code name NodeCloud.

Rather than follow through with this plan, Xhin raised over $5,000 from the community that disappeared and never went toward the site. It is speculated that he kept it for himself. This speculation caused several users who had donated to abandon the site altogether, driving the already dwindling user base down dramatically.

In 2015, the website Gametalk 2 was launched (www.gametalk2.com) which was created as another sequel to Gametalk. It, too, failed, and has been replaced with an error page.

After most of the copycat sites went down, Xhin's GTX0 remained the only similar site. It suffered from a lack of advertising and a rampant alt-right problem which drove regular users away and deterred new people from posting. Eventually, a discord was created to keep up with the times; however the discord suffered from the same issues as the site, with poor management of trolls and harassment.

Sources:

http://gametalk.com/

www.gametalk2.com

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main/gametalk.com

GametalkX.0