I joined Forumosa 1.0 way back in the early 00s. I disappeared for a few years…er, more like a decade. Decided to come back and am here in Forumosa 2.0 under a new name.
What happened to the likes of TomHill, Maoman, Sandman, Dragonbones, Muzha Man and BigFluffyMatthew?
Maoman and Sandman still post over at Taiwanease. Dragonbones posts both over there and here. Mucha Man’s posts tailed off after he moved to Malaysia, and I believe he’s no longer involved with Lonely Planet Taiwan, so he doesn’t have as much to do with Taiwan these days. I suspect he’s one of the more casual users that got lost in the transition to Forumosa 2.0 - we probably lost a lot of people who have gone to the old site and not bothered with the 60-90 seconds it takes to figure out a new log-in.
Many move back to their original countries, or on to a different one. Others get bored of online life. Probably a good number now live most of their online lives on Facebook: I suspect one reason Taiwanease is so quiet is that many of the users know each other in real life, and communicate mostly on Facebook. Plenty have kids, and for some reason that limits the amount of time they can spend online.
If you want to get mildly creepy, you can search for users and see when their last posts and visits were.
There seems to be some apprehension that posting early join dates from Forumosa and/or older posts from the old Oriented site could reveal negative or sensitive information about members. Therefore, I’ve deleted the earlier content of this post. My apologies.
We need to tread a little carefully when digging up old posters as some of them might be dead. Like that poor bloke who lost it and stabbed himself in the neck.