Websites

Long before social media, the Ghostbusters fan community lived on personal homepages, message boards, and fan-run news sites. This section of the wiki collects the websites that built that community: the early "shrine" homepages of the 1990s, the news and reference hubs, the prop-building archives that taught a generation how to make a Proton Pack, the podcasts and radio shows, and the regional fan groups that organized around them. Many of these sites are long gone, surviving only in web archives, but their content and the people behind them shaped the fandom that GBFans.com grew out of.

Use the links below to reach individual site histories. Each page records what the site was, who ran it, roughly when it operated, and what it was known for.

The early homepages

The first wave of Ghostbusters fan sites went up in the mid-1990s as personal homepages. The Ghostbusters Homepage, Bill Emkow's site, was one of the first online, active from January 1996 to January 2000. Emkow described it as "a shrine to the best movie ever made," and it offered a merchandise section, an equipment page carrying Norm's original Proton Pack and Ghost Trap plans, the first film's script, trivia, and the Ghostbusters message board. When Emkow retired the site, he handed that message board to Chad Paulson.

GB Central was Chad Paulson's original site; it was later converted into Ghostbusters.net, which Paulson continued to maintain as an archive of pictures and streaming episodes of the animated series. The Ghostbusters Homepage message board carried over to Ghostbusters.net through this lineage.

The Ghostbusters Fan Forum ran from December 4, 1997 to October 31, 2008, operated by Doreen Mulman and Nora Salisbury. It was among the first sites to host a wide range of fan-submitted content. Through her work on the forum, Mulman went on to maintain several official voice-actor sites, beginning with one for Tara Charendoff (now Tara Strong). The forum closed when AOL ended free member webspace.