Forums are a great way to bind a community together. There are forums about any subject you can think of, but dolling forums are something special. If you want to get involved with the community, it is necessary to find the doll forum you fit in with.
Over time there have been a few well known doll forums. Each was distinct and unique, which attracted a certain type of doller and promoted a certain kind of dolling. Because forums can be a very closed off community it is easy to get the idea that dolling only is done a certain way. But there are as many different dollers as forums, each with their own rules about interacting and dolling. And as each forum at some point dies, new forums with new rules pop up.

One of the oldest big doll forums was Eden Enchanted, also know as EE. It closed in 2008, leaving many dollers lost as where to go next. What The Muffin?! (WTM) was the next bigger forum that disappeared. I actually signed up for WTM, but somehow the admins didn't have time to approve new members anymore. And recently Fairytopia has announced it will be moving. That means that Fairytopia will close and a new forum will be opened at a new url. Where EE and WTM were still active forums though, FT was seeing a decline in activity over the last year.

Forums that are still active and going strong are The Gathering, a forum started by Xandorra. Even though Xandorra is no longer active in the dolling community, the forum still manages to keep active. I find it a great board for support of any kind. Pixel Princess is another forum that has been running for a long time, and has a close knit community. It feels like a cozy forum, where you can find a lot of great dollers. But at the time of writing, the biggest and most successful forum right now has to be Glam!. It is full of new posts every day, the atmosphere is fun loving, free and open and there are plenty of activities going on.

There are still new doll forums opening. But because the community is smaller than you think, and people have usually found their preferred forum already, it is hard to make a successful new forum for dollers. Then again, not every forum needs to be big and active. Sometimes it is great to be a part of a smaller community and get to know a few dollers much better than on a bigger forum.

A great place to find your perfect forum and to advertise your own forum is the Dolling Directory. It never hurts to sign up for a few forums and look around to see if this is the forum for you. You may find you prefer smaller forums so that you get better feedback. Or that you prefer bigger forums where lots of different things happen. Either way, once you find your own forum spot, you will have made a big step getting involved in the dolling community.