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Entry posted by Sobend
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Yes, I apologize for speaking about another "rival" fan-site on this forum, but I thought I would post anyway. A little Sunday sacrilege is fit anywhere.
As you all know by now, the traditional RuneScape fan-sites started to "die" sometime around 2010 or even earlier. I will not speculate on the reasons, but it happened with every site and every community, all of which were forum-based. New players stopped joining, current users stopped playing the game, and eventually people started going elsewhere, like Reddit. To me, the issue was mainly pronounced here with the lack of people playing the game, which became low in the 2010s, despite a core of that community still existing (and still existing now). This is particularly true for Runescape 3, where maybe 15 forum users were actively playing the game by the time of release.
But activity did not wane uniformly across all fan-sites, and one was just active enough to be useful for Runescape 3 -- Tip.it. When I became an RS member in 2013, Tip.it had an active community of maybe one hundred or more active Runescape 3 players. This was by no means the glory days, but people would have conversations on the game, give bossing tips, and discuss updates at length. A lot of these players were also really good at the game -- a few I am tempted to name, but I decide against doing that because they did not know me, and I thought it might be strange for them 
. It was a nice place to have a "traditional" fansite community feel while still finding good discussion. Even then, I knew it was an anachronistic experience.
I browsed Tip.it until I started losing interest in Runescape 3 in 2016. After coming back to Runescape 3 in the COVID-19 pandemic, I noticed everyone on that site disappeared. Unlike Sals, which always kept a pulse, it seems like Tip.it evaporated relatively quickly, in 2016-2018. Now nothing is discussed. I also checked out their friends chat this morning ("sc" or HYT) and found only one person in there besides me. It looks like the site was completely offline for some time until someone started paying for the servers again.
Looking at the traditional fansites as a whole, it looks like they've all died except for Sals Realm, which mainly survives through the discord and in-game clans in Runescape 3 and Old School. Perhaps some others live on in one form or another, but I can't find their communities. Perhaps the issue is that all of these fansites based their communities on forums--a long-dying communication form--and their Runescape help website--eventually outclassed by the wiki, just like how Wikipedia outclassed all encyclopedias in popularity. I'm thankful that Sals Realm persists, though as I write this I am reminded that the Runescape 3 clan has had low activity lately, possibly because the game itself is slowly declining in numbers.
Even back in the 2010s when I was browsing, people on Tip.it were complaining about how low activity was on their site. Looking back at their posts, I get a feeling that they did not understand what they had at that instant, which was something. Now there is nothing. One day we may also have that feeling about Sals Realm.
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