MeriStation Zonaforo

» see zonaforo.meristation.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Every country that got broadband early ended up with one enormous forum that everybody who played games was on. In Spain it was Zonaforo, opened in 2000 and attached to MeriStation, the Spanish-language games site that had been running since the late nineties. By the time it closed it held over two million threads and more than forty-five million posts from 628,594 registered accounts.

I never read a word of it and I know exactly what it was, because I spent those same years on donanimhaber and frmtr. The shape repeats everywhere it appears: a site about hardware or games grows a forum, and then the forum turns out to hold most of what the whole thing is worth. I had a signature with my hardware list in it, the way everybody did.

MeriStation's administrators posted the closing notice on 3 May 2021. The forum went down on 5 May. That is under two days between the announcement and the end of a twenty-one-year archive.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ why nothing survived ~

The ordinary move for a forum a company no longer wants is read-only mode. You stop new registrations and new posts, you leave the pages up, and the archive stays searchable for anyone who needs it later. MeriStation was asked for exactly that and refused. The administrator's answer was that the forum could not be left in read-only mode and that everything would be deleted, so members had a weekend to save whatever they personally cared about. The reason given for closing at all was that users had moved to other channels and forum activity had been falling.

~ what the domain does now ~

The old forum hostname still answers. It answers with a 301 to as.com/meristation, the games section of Diario AS, which is the sports paper PRISA folded MeriStation into. PRISA had bought MeriStation in 2007 for 600,000 euros. The brand is alive and publishing daily, with a logo and a staff. The part of it that 628,594 people built is now a redirect into the part that a company owns.

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