were pre-social media forums popular in your country/region?

here we used to have some arabic forums on the earlier days but they all kinda imploded towards the mid 2010s or earlier so i dont think they ever left the niche side of things, used to see some crazy stuff on there though not gonna lie 😭

oddly enough my first exposure to a internet forum before those was on neopets tho in the 2000s, idk what country that comes from but i needed a cheat code for the Playstation game