Thank you!!!
The France board of Chowhound was quite active.
Ultimately, Europeans arenât online as much as Americans and if you try to find food discussion sites in other languages, youâll find they pale in size compared to those in English.
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And it is active here, too 
Altho it probz should be called the âParisâ board to reflect 99% of its content.
There used to be a German SM site similar to Yelp (Quipe) that ended up being bought up by Yelp. I met a bunch of fun folks through that site in Berlin, where the more active/regular posters would meet up for meals at various eateries around town. Quipe was much more personal & interactive than Yelp.
I also met a bunch of wonderful people on CH with whom I became good friends & have met numerous times over the years since my departure from CH, which was well over a decade ago.
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Although the HO Paris board has had a couple of losses this past year or so (with the passing of John Talbott & the disappearance of Parn), itâs full of former CH posters and has actually increased with the addition of current HO posters who travel there a lot.
The HO Italy board has been increasing the # of posters pretty regularly, with some of them being long time CH contributors. However, the days of regular posts by Maureen Fant, Elizabeth Minchilli and Katie Parla are gone. Still a very solid board.
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Wait⌠thereâs a Paris board? J/k, but you kinda made my point 
If anything, the France category is one of the livelier ones of all the countries in Yurp.
I get it, the majority of posters here are US-based, and thatâs a-ok. I live here, after all.
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They are still out and about in London, doing what they love, i.e. seeking out new places to eat and eating. But I canât get them to join HO - they both seemed to have taken food-blogging out of their lives now,
I still keep in contact with both of them - limsterâs birthday was last month, I sent him a greeting and we exchanged some news updates on WhatsApp then.
JFores and his wife are coming to Penang next month, and I plan to show them some of Penangâs heritage food places which I know theyâll like. I did the same for Guy Dimond (ex-Time Out London Food & Wine Editor) and Susan Low (ex-BBC Food Editor) when they were here last year and they really enjoyed the experience.
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As a curiosity, why not?
If they find new places to eat, do they not wish others to know?
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I donât know - somehow, they just gave up after Chowhound closed down back then. Iâll ask JFores if heâll start again when I see him next month.
Limster does research work and lectures at Kingâs College - heâd always cited increasing workload there.
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I remember it for sure. I was living in NYC at the time of the first days and it was so good for sharing and getting tips. I think the NYC focus gave it a community.
For people who are all upset by the notion that this website helped shape current food culture: Why? The nineties and early oughts were crucial for how internet shaped a number of communities, interactions, and ways of thinking about culture and politics (the activism of the alt globalisation movement for instance). Yes, listservs and forums where small versions but they brought incremental changes to value and to the role of civilians entering and gaining prominence in areas traditionally reserved for the experts or professionals who had public platforms.
Chowhound and early boards (but definitely chowhound because it was a sharing tips about cheap eats and unexpected spaces for good food) changed the focus and showed an audience and an appetite for âethnicâ (oy, bear with me) food and things that no one else was writing about (because of the economy of publications).
Meanwhile, as I remember this, I think of it as a space that allowed me to map out bike rides (and to share finds although to be honest, I was doubles mad at the time). Man, this thread/article and the Bad Bunny halftime show really make me miss NYC.
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Link to the data for that??
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Perhaps so, but in my experience we are prolific in posting restaurant reviews to, say, Tripadvisor. For all its faults, it is often the best source of identifying possible good places to eat in locations you donât know . Of course, much of the traffic that would have been found on the likes of Chowhound/eGullet/ HO is now on various Facebook groups and other social media outlets. The traditional food forum is a dying species as with pretty much all other subject forums.
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Hmmm, I find a bit of a sweeping generalisation that may not hold up. For one, Europe has a comparable if not higher rate of internet penetration and subsequent use. I also think that searching for âinternationalâ (non-anglophone) food sites will not yield what you think. Search engines are tailored to your language and region. It also doesnât address the numbers of visitors to particular sites (which can exceed the visitors to the ones based in the US).
Itâs not a point worth arguing really. It might be that you have the stats to back this one up. But I think sometimes Americans (US-ians) assume centrality because the world seems more aware of whatâs going on there than Americans are whatâs going on elsewhere.
I do wonder, though, if this perspective is born from the fact that food boards in English have a more international make up (sort of a default gathering space based on many peopleâs second language.
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Miss Chowhound. Old good times.
I remember waiting for table in Shripraphai for hoursâŚ
The areas referenced were Europe vs English forums so there is a caveat but my experience in Asia is that Japanenese, Chinese and Thai language forums have more traffic and better discussion than English language versions. They donât always present in the CH, HO, egullet format however.
It does fit with your argument around American centrality, informational format of English language sites and search engines results in different regions.
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Thanks for the update on limster and jfores. Hope you have a good chowdown with Justin next month!
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(Canadians are also addicted to their phones and the Internet, despite being a distinct society. LOL. I am pretty sure our little Ontario board is one of the more active regional boards on HO)
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Started on CH on 11/29/2000 in a quick response to someone on the Boston board. My participation was very limited until CH opened up a few other boards that werenât restaurant-specific (which I know Leff opposed). Those were the boards I preferred, and when the Home Cooking Board showed up, I was in my element. (Again, opposed by Leff, but eventually became one of the busiest boards on CH.)
I read and participated through the CNET purchase, the overhaul of the site after the acquisition (when they actually listened to the beta-testing users in 2012 or 2013 as to what was important to us), the merger into CBS, the additional overhauls - with them NOT listening to the users as they made the site virtually unusable in 2015 and they put multiple people in a âTime Outâ for 10 days (including myself for pointing out an obvious shill) for expressing their opinion. Turns out they didnât want our opinion and actually permanently banned people from the site. Came to HO on 9/23/2015 during my Time Out after the last ghastly re-do of the site, when I found out about it on CH and I was disgusted with their treatment of long-time contributors. I was reinstated (without having to apologize as Marssy told me I needed to do) as I wanted to remove pictures, but their re-do didnât allow me to do so. So I pretty much dropped my participation.
Guess they realized too late that the mass exodus that the users made the site what it was and could no longer be. I had an Email back and forth with Sully about a single removed post of mine in 2019 (in which I commented about a Mod no longer on the board, IIRC). But I had expected it to be removed anyway. LOL I noted to him that if you disappoint Melanie Wong, one of the most prolific and knowledgeable contributors on CH throughout its lifetime, youâve really screwed up. His response to my response was typically condescending. But he probably picked that up from their venerable leader at the time, good olâ Georges.
I noted to him in 2019 that âLeaving CH, while it was painful and disheartening at the time, is like moving out of that REALLY great, large, low-rent apartment with great views of the city specifically because you have a neighbor who stomps on the floor in the middle of the night while having fights with his girlfriend and plays the drums and smokes incessantly when heâs not fighting with his girlfriend. You think âWHY am I putting up with this?â Once you get off your butt and look elsewhere, you find a great new place to live that doesnât have smokers, drummers, and fighting couples.â
And Iâve had only one CH get-together with @Harters and the Mrs., and @GretchenS .
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And Iâd venture a guess that the HC board with its various subcategories is still the busiest board here, with the WFD thread being the most popular, populous & longest running (AFAICT â no doubt there are site statistics about this sort of stuff 
).
Thank you in that context for creating such a wonderful, friendly & welcoming kitchen table for former CHs, and HOs old and new alike 
Also, I love your analogy in the final paragraph.
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I donât have any stats, but when I looked for any kind of French equivalent of Chowhound or eGullet or anything at all really, there were slim pickings indeed. But I think the same is true for other subjects. No doubt other countries have more and faster internet access among the general population (some folks here still use dial up), but I donât see that as carrying over to participation in Social Media. Europe has a larger population that the US, but I donât think they post as much.
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Thatâs funny Matt, as a tech guy, when zagats first went online, I wrote a script to scrape all the scores so I could sort by food score/decor score.
My wife was not pleasedđ
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