A community older than its software
ATCsforALL is a community for artist trading cards and mail art. Members make small original artworks, swap them by post in themed swaps, and show the results. The oldest thread still online was started in February 2008, and the community’s line, “Everyone is welcome here”, still opens its home page. We didn’t make the community. Our part is keeping its platform running and its eighteen years of artwork findable.
The archive comes in three parts, each with its own job:
- The forum is where swaps are announced, joined and run. The Swap Archive forum alone holds 779,900 messages.
- The media gallery holds the artwork itself: 189,651 uploads in 2,539 albums.
- The Swap Gallery is the finished record of each completed swap: who hosted it, when, and what was made.
The move that shaped it
In November 2023 the community left vBulletin 4.2.5 and its PhotoPlog gallery for XenForo and its Media Gallery. WordPress took over the home page and the Swap Gallery. Our records don’t show who carried out that move, so we describe it rather than claim it. It matters because of what it preserved:
- Numbers kept. Thread, member and gallery numbers carried over. A thread, a member or an artwork from the vBulletin years has the same number today.
- Dates kept. Gallery items kept their original dates. An item uploaded in June 2008 still says June 2008.
- The archive albums follow the old gallery’s categories, so long-time members find their work where they left it.
- The Swap Gallery came from the old static swap pages: 656 of them became WordPress posts, with the same text and byte-identical images.
One gap remains. Old forum paths redirect to the new ones, but the oldest vBulletin-style thread links land on a not-found page. The numbers carried over, so those links can still be mapped. That is on our list.
Finding things in 190,000 pictures
A gallery this size is only useful if people can get around it:
- Media gallery: recent uploads appear on the forum’s front page, and What’s New lists new media and new comments. Trending media sits on the gallery’s index, and every member’s media and albums are a click from their posts. Each picture has a code for placing it in a forum post, with a help page explaining how.
- Swap Gallery: it can be searched, and it is browsed a page at a time.
Since 2024 the forum has added passkey sign-in, a dark mode and an installable app.
How it pays for itself
The community is funded by its members and a few sponsors:
- Monthly donations, thanked by name on the home page.
- Supporter upgrades called Friends of AFA.
- Two art-supply sponsors, linked with a plain disclosure that purchases earn a small commission.
- Google ads on the WordPress pages.
What can be measured
The forum’s own statistics, read on 28 October 2026:
| Measure | Count |
|---|---|
| Messages | 1,520,089 |
| Threads | 21,388 |
| Members | 2,768 |
| Uploaded artworks | 189,651 |
| Albums | 2,539 |
| Comments | 276,361 |
The Swap Gallery holds 665 completed swaps, from 2008 to 2024.
For comparison, the last full vBulletin record, from October 2023, showed 1,489,731 posts and a gallery of 181,244 files. New work keeps arriving: the newest artwork in the gallery was uploaded on 27 October 2026.
