I'm new here, but was this place more popular, like was there a "Glory Days"?

The early years - '05 to '08, when we were still figuring most things out, and had the promise of the new movies. Things then stabilised and then eased off during the long drawn out release of that series.

I heard from the first members that the golden age was around until 2008 or 2009, but I also know people that'd ascribe that to 2009-2013 or so, or even 2013-15. You have to remember that in 2005 Eva was already 10 years old, it was already somewhat legacy, but that also coincided with the likes of Toonami making the show explode in popularity in the US and other Anglo markets. So then we have Rebuild getting anounced, then 1.0, then 2.0, then 3.0, and all of those have distinct peaks of popularity. It even varies massively with how much those impacted the fandom in different spheres like the chans, fan sites, facebook, twitter and tumblr.

Anyway, I'd say the "hugely and consistently active" phase passed in 2017 because that's around the time when forums started to die out to Web 2.0 and modern social media. Then we have a few months of big activity with the Netflix release in 2019 and 3.0+1.0 in 2021. So you also have to take into account how much the overall fandom grew (look at Reddit, which now has over 1 million subscribers and was founded by one of the co-founders here, and even shares several active members with us even today). The weird thing about this forum is that it and the wiki are so massively influential that it still retains a big viewership but I've talked to so many people that never posted anything here because they think forums are weird and intimidating. And it's been 20 years. This already puts Evageeks far off the curve for internet longivity. It's quite an achievement, I think.

Yeah, not just EvaGeeks but forums heyday overall are mostly gone. Social media and other platforms are more popular.

But well, this place will likely be here for a very long time, so why not check it and post from time to time? Many social networks will come and go and this place will likely be here, with some spikes of popularity from time to time.

I'm also new. Since I just binged the new film series yesterday, I came to this section looking to learn more about the manga and other Evangelion content.

I'm still figuring out what I think of the Rebuild movies. Right now I don't plan to do more than flip through the manga.

All of this is because I rewatched the whole original series lately and realized I have a higher opinion of the original than I did the first time I went through the whole thing a few years ago.

Previous to that, I had only fragmentary exposure to Eva although it intrigued me.

I hope to discuss the whole thing with people who are active now.

When I first arrived here, around 2020, this place was still quite popular. We were all very excited about Shin and still had plenty of free time, I think. It was very common for threads to spread across at least six or seven pages. This only got better when Shin was released in March 2021. It took almost 6 months for us to be able to watch it and people were very excited about it.
After that, starting in 2022, popularity began to decline. It's only natural. Evangelion is apparently over for now and this site is "hardcore" by definition. Other franchises like Dragon Ball and Sonic still have active online forums because they are bigger and always have some kind of release.

I just found out about this place from the “official” discord server. I’d been there since 2022 and never knew it was a server for this forum. Cool though.

ive been joining anime forums from the 2000s lately and im honestly getting nostalgia over old online spaces!!!! im so sad forums dont exist anymoar! we have discord servers nowadays but it doesnt compare. . . i remember being on pokemon forums when iwas like 8 but they were already dying )))):

Maybe

I was here all the way back in 2012, when I was using the name seoulgamer, but I got locked out of my account and haven't been able to regain access to it. I wanted to grapple with the themes of Evangelion as I tried to make sense of it all for my fanfiction project, but no matter what ideas I came up with, I seemed to just keep repeating the very cliches that Evangelion seemed insistent on dismantling. I couldn't reconcile my desire for a happy ending with the reality of what Evangelion actually meant artistically. As a result, by 2015, I gave up on this impossibly intimidating project and stopped posting. I accepted Evangelion as it was and stopped participating in discourse around it. The rebuild films were a total disappointment to me, and my last hopes for some sort of happy ending for Shinji and Rei were dashed by the final rebuild movie in 2020.

Only in 2024 did I begin to re-engage with the original material, and by 2025 I had an outline plan for a fanfiction, though due to challenging health issues (man I hate being old now) I didn't start writing until 2026. To me it's very noticeable how this fandom has dropped off even since 2024. It's a ghost town now. I deeply regret that I didn't have the writing skill or judgement to really engage with the work critically until very recently. I guess it's too late now, but I still feel moved by this material. I formed my own opinions about who the characters are or could be, I just have no one left to discuss these things with any more. But slow starts in life seem like the norm for me anyway. I suppose like Anno himself, I am a failed human being. What a shock to find such a person enjoys Evangelion, I know! But even if the fandom is dead, I think Evangelion still have a place for me, because it was written by a failure for failures.

I wouldn't say that about the Eva fandom proper given other Eva communities, but also I wouldn't add much to my post from above besides the fact that we did get the 30th anniversary short and the Yoko Taro anime.

There is a statistic at bottom of the front page: Most users ever online was 6262 on Wed Aug 06, 2025 11:15 am.

Probably most of these users were anonymous lurkers, but nevertheless, I think we may break it with release of the new anime, given it's good enough.

To be fair, what happened on August 6th 2025?

We've been suffering from bot swarms of the past year or so - possibly a DDoS, possibly just a rogue scraper network. Even the big movie releases didn't get to more than about 2000 concurrent visits.