The Rise of Reptile Forums
The year 2000, AOL was merging with Time Warner and Netscape was soon to be beat out by Internet Explorer. The internet was 
still in its infancy. The only thing a reptile keeper could think of was hearing the sound of their modem screeching. This sound meant he/she was soon on the internet. This is where you could spend hours reading and conversing with other like-minded herpetoculturists on a couple of reptile forums. Kingsnake.com was one of the leading websites for many reptile enthusiasts. By the time 2000 rolled around kingsnake.com was the leading pet website on the internet. Beating out some of the big box stores including PetCo. The reptile forums or message boards on kingsnake.com were a real hit, they also offered classifieds, email, search engines, web radio broadcasts, and moderated guest chats. Quite the feat for a company that started the reptile forums craze on no money and only word of mouth advertising. In 1997, Rich Zuchowski of owner of SerpenCo started a reptile forum on his corn snake breeding business’s website, serpenco.com. During the late 1990s kingsnake.com’s reptile forums were offline and Rich saw a gaping hole and secured cornsnakes.com. All the while he was still hosting his reptile forum on the SerpenCo website. This particular forum was quite popular, but due to Rich’s competition selling cornsnakes from his own personal site he decided to start a new website called HerpWantedAds.com. This became quite popular with not only herpetoculturists but also other exotic keepers and breeders. Rich figured the name HerpWantAds.com was just to restricting and could limit his reach to a broader audience. The thoughts of changing the name were a great thing, but there was just something in his way. The name, Fauna Classifieds, was already being used by William Gillingham. William was the president and publisher of various publications including one called Fauna Classifieds. Eventually after realizing the publication had stopped being published a few years earlier, Rich contacted William. Rich respectfully asked if he could use the name Fauna Classifieds for his new website. William renounced and blessed Rich on his new endeavor. 
Faunaclassifieds.com is still around today and is best known for its board of inquiry (BOI) and their classifieds. I’d visit this site pretty much every day in the early 2000s to look at the classifieds. The reptile forums on Faunaclassifieds were a little clunky for me and preferred to stick to viewing the classifieds. Either way these were the two most popular reptile forums in the beginning.
The Good Ole Days
Throughout most of the first decade of the 21st century these reptile forums were where herpetoculturists exchanged ideas, thoughts, breeding successes or failures, and sold their offspring. This was also the beginning of a huge Ball Python trend. Prior to 2002 colubrids ruled the reptile forum scene and especially corn snakes with some incredible multi-morph mutations being created every year. If you are not old enough to remember I am sure you have heard many times about the colubrid hay day. If not, stop by and talk with the likes of Robert Applegate, Stephen Hammock, and Mark Bell they’ll have fascinating stories to tell. Fast forward, to only a few years ago when social media decided to rear its head to the public. It was around 2010 when Facebook started becoming the newest trend not only for the younger generation but also as a way for hundreds of millions of people to join together in one central place. By the time 2011 rolled around I was hooked on Facebook, not for reptile discussions but for chatting with old friends and colleagues throughout the world. It wasn’t until the late part of 2012 when I finally dove head first into the world of Facebook groups and created Locality Lampropeltis. Even though many of my longtime friends were still hanging on to the reptile forums I was finding a new group of people just as knowledgeable. The best part is by this time I would consider myself a mediocre hobbyist, still do to this day and was able to converse with some of the herpetologists worldwide. First hand research was at my finger tips and only a private message away. A longtime colleague from the reptile forums, Jorge Sierra decided to open a group called Colubrid Crazy around the same time. Jorge is the owner of Sierra Snakes and is a prominent factor in breeding Florida Kingsnakes (Lampropeltis getula floridana). His group has grown exponentially over the past two years and has recently broken four thousand members. Currently, I’m being added to reptile and amphibian groups every day on Facebook. Are these all being created by the old reptile forum members?
The Fall
Web statistics are not a 100% guarantee but can show the trends of where herpetoculture has been and could go.
Kingsnake.com has dropped as a keyword search on Google by 90% since 2005. Reptile forums have dropped by 92% since August 2008 which was its largest search month ever.
All the while Snakes for sale, Lizards for sale and Reptile for sale have stayed steady. According to compete.com Kingsnake has dropped 48% in unique visitors since August 2013. Faunaclassified which has seen a steady growth in memberships through this time is still adding memberships every day. Will this continue and is it because you can post free classified ads on the site? The days of hosting your pictures on a third-party site and then having to code them into a reptile forum post are gone thanks to Facebook. They became the largest photo host in 2011. The ease of using this type of platform saves time. 
You also don’t have to refresh your page anymore to see the replies to your post. Facebook provides automatic updates and instant messaging services. The down falls to using Facebook is trying to find a post you commented on days ago. Or looking for that lizard you wanted to buy in one of the many groups. These negatives haven’t seemed to convert reptile enthusiasts back to the forums. This is more than enough proof that the once prominent reptile forums are now a thing of the past and herpetoculturists are using other avenues to discuss the various topics of keeping and breeding reptiles. Are they using social media formats like Google+, Facebook and Facebook groups, Twitter, or any of the other major social media outlets? What are your thoughts on this topic and do you see reptile forums ever coming back to the forefront like they were just 5-7 years ago?