General Forum

TCDB is the best IMO, and I have been on at least half of them. If a collector chooses to input their collection inventory here, trade inventory, and want list, and participate in crowd sourcing set lists and card images, and participate in the forums, and take part in trading, this site offers the most

my ratings are

1.  TCDB

2. Blowout - Buy / sell / trade - a large active community, but focused on new release and high end.  a ton of chatter

3.  The Bench Trading - not as many active as Blowout, also new release and high end focused

4.  SCF  - Sports Card Forum - not as many active as The Bench, a nice blend of new / old, high / low

5. Beckett Trading - subscription to Beckett / membership cost demotes it.  I have been off for 10 years

6, Hobby Kings - too focused on basketball

7.  All the rest

agree, disagree, discuss

This is essentially the only one I spend time on. I have a membership at SCF but didn't enjoy it all that much. Have not logged in in several years. 

Beckett is a waste. I had a log in there but they say there is no record of me. Not even blocked, Must have purged me. I won't waste my time there. 

Don't really like Blowout. They've done some good work on that forum in exposing the scams in graded cards, but the company did me wrong so I don't really give them the time of the day. (If anyone is wondering, I bought something from the company, but part of it was opened and had some of the cards stolen. They offered a $5 credit on a $20 blaster and then refused to even honor that until I showed them a screencap of the email saying they would. I have not bought from them since. Not saying I won't again if they have something I need at a competitive/good price, but...I don't really look often either)  I'm not sure if I ever registered  on the forum there or not. 

Never heard of the others you mentioned. 

I very much miss Trader Retreat. I joined that forum in either 2000 or 2001 and had some great times- and some great trades. I dialed back some when I got taken in a trade and they didn't do anything to fix it...not even force the guy to apologize. He eventually got banned for cursing out the admin in their chatroom. Should have listened to me. That was a daily check for me from when I joined until 2005 or 06. I wish I could find my old feedback on there...or at least my Member of the Month badges. I didn't know how to make screencaps at the time or else I would have had them. I think I won twice, which is surprising as I was nowhere near as well funded as most of the people on there. 

NUTS (NASCAR Underground Trading Society) is great for NASCAR cards but there's hardly any activity. I can check it once a year and read everything I've missed in 20 minutes. Many people left when Press Pass closed and never came back, which I can't understand, because the love of the sport isn't tied to any card company.  It's very hard/frustrating to read because they have it set to that every single word starts with a capital letter. I'm not always great at typing and grammar but that is just too jarring. I joined in 2009 and it was a daily check until around 2012/2013. 

I also miss the Non-Sports Card Forum. It, like NUTS, had very little activity, I checked in about once a month. Then it was gone. It was the only place where non-sports cards were discussed as the main focus, not just an afterthought to sports cards. The card companies even announced new releases on there and occasionally gave away promo cards. 

I will occasionally pop in to the Collector's Universe forum, but there's very little collecting there...it's almost all speculation. Not a total surprise as it's owned by a grading company, but it's not particularly enjoyable for me. I also take part in the coin forum there, which is another hobby of mine, although a long-neglected one. The World Coin section used to have a lot more activity but it's my favorite. I've been a member of that forum since 2008, making it the second longest I've stayed an active member of any forum, although "active" is debatable as I go months without commenting or even visiting. My first longest is a model car forum which I have been active on since late 2000 or 2001. (2000 is when my family got internet access) It's been several months now since I've logged in there too though. However, I still consider myself a member. 95% of my facebook interaction is with people from that forum and the one it spun out of. 

I have very little interaction with anyone from the card hobby outside of this forum. Of course, I am not totally surprised by that either, because...you all know who I am. 

I ONLY use TCDB and NUTS now! TCDB has the best database and functions AND the best overall community. NUTS is just a forum, but it's a great community of NASCAR fans. I try hard to keep the things that I like living when it seems like they might not make it much longer.

@Billy, NUTS is much more active this year than it has been in the past several years. Press Pass closing was the main factor for the drop in activity back in 2015, but it's been more that the membership is literally dying off since then. We have lost so many members in the past few years. They all have "In Memoriam" marks with their names now. I'm trying to bring in new and younger members and it has helped over the past year. But people just don't post or reply enough there to keep others interested. My Fantasy Game moving over there from Beckett had a huge impact on the forum though. You should check in more often and reply to something.

BACK TO THE TOPIC AT HAND: I never really cared for SFC or Blowout. I tried them and it just wasn't worth my time back then. I started in the "online hobby" with Beckett back in 2003. It was great and I learned most of what I needed to know about trading through the mail back then. But Beckett completely changed their website in 2011 and that ticked off a lot of members. The site has steadily declined ever since then to be practically nothing now as far as a forum is concerned. The forum there in EVERY SPORT is basically dead. I started a NASCAR Fantasy Game in the Racing Forum back in 2014 JUST to try to keep that forum alive. It kinda worked as I had 8-12 people playing the game every year. So that kept more people paying attention to that forum than would have checked in more than once a month without my weekly game. There were obviously other people looking at the game without playing too.

But Beckett is seriously lacking on the quality of ANYTHING they do now. They don't update their DB with anything other than the garbage CL's that the manufacturers provide ( IE: card numbers that should actually be letters) and most cards have no BV's listed anymore after the base cards! They refuse to list cards in the DB that they missed before, EVEN when given EVERYTHING they need to know to add it (including scans of a card)! They also don't let scans of cards upload when they have no scans for the card. Their automation sucks and their customer service sucks even worse. But Beckett also continues to raise their prices from time to time and the price jack last Summer during the Pandemic was my tipping point. They jumped the price for a Total Access Online Price Guide from $35/month to $41.99/month. That is twice the amount of the last several price increases of $3.00 per month with the last one being several years ago! When I started buying the TA OPG, it was $21/month! A single-sport OPG was $6/month and is now $14/month. See how they suck just in pricing?!

I was so sick of Beckett's crap after that surprise price-hike that I posted a thread about how Beckett finally priced me out of their product, knowing that many customers got priced out years before then. Nobody replied in my thread, but there were hundreds of views of that post. I made that post in August or September of 2020. But then Beckett got worse. So I posted in the Racing Forum in December 2020 that I would be moving my "Racing Forum Fantasy Game" over to the NUTS forum. Maybe I shouldn't have said that it would "kill the Beckett Racing Forum" that I revived by starting the game, but I knew it was true. Beckett actually retaliated by banning me from the forums for 3 or 5 days (can't remember the actual number now and just don't care). So when I got back into the forums, they had everything I posted go through "administrators - for approval". But nothing got approved for days and it didn't matter what I was posting about either. After posting about a great trade (on this site but without mentioning TCDB at all) that I made that was in and related to a specific thread there with a couple pages of replies in the past several months and my post not getting added, I went around Beckett's BS. I had a friend who is also a member here and on NUTS post the exact reply that I had posted for Beckett to review. In rapid succession, I was banned from Beckett and threads and replies I've made for the past 17 years have been quickly deleted. Beckett wants to delete a member that spent SO MUCH money for their crappy products for well over a decade leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. BUT I also know that I DID kill the Racing Forum. I have friends and I know what happened after Beckett baaned me. BECKETT SUCKS!!! It seems that I know the hobby better than they do and that made them mad. They are so lazy! I even sent emails to a couple of staff members before AND after the ban just to get some info and nobody replied. The lack of replies is because NONE of those people still work for Beckett!

I used SCF before coming here but I didn't really like the interface for the collection side. The forum was OK for awhile but they were lax on moderation... aka people posting BST threads in discussion threads and they just sit there forever. I stopped using SCF one day when i got a SQL error, which is normally not an issue to see on a website, but the error showed my unhashed password. So I will not go back to a site that is leaking passwords, no matter how cool the forums are.

Well obviously I rank this one first and try to encourage others to come to it. 
 

Billy and anyone else interested for non sports cards check out

https://forum.vintagenonsports.com/

I really like this forum, and I like the people that are here. TCDB is the best for logging collections and identifying trading partners. I've found the culture here to be very generous and gracious.

I've been active on a couple of threads on Blow Out, and I've enjoyed some of their message boards. Cool folks are over there, too.

One not mentioned is the r/baseballcards subreddit. I've made a few trades there without any problems.

When just talking about trading site.  I'm down to TCDB only but do check in to a couple of others once a month or so.  I have join 20 or more trading site over the years.  I listed my Pros and Cons on all sites that I have traded and purchased cards from here before.   Here is the part about trading sites .   TCDB and Beckett is not in the list as they were high up on my list.   Beckett has gone down as of late.

Sportscardfun, baseballcardstore, Husker swap, Ewanted, The Pit, Thebenchtrading, Sportcardisland, Naxcom, Sportscardsheriff, Topps, Sportsfreaks, Tradingcardcenteral, Sportscarddirect, Blowout, and a few more. Some may be gone.

Pros: I have find cards on most all of them. Some sellers/traders are real nice and fair prices and williing to deal.

Cons:  Hard to find cards I need now days.    Appears I have run them out of cards I need. Most sellers/traders only do the Hot players or stars or just one sport. They trend not doing commons and no name players. Prices are on the higher side and trades are not even from al ot of members. Most sellers/traders are members of several sites. Each site appears to have a core of members and not a lot of active going on.   Same members will repost a lot. Most messages do not get replies.

I following this thread because I think it may provide some useful information. I only use this site and and then I have a few Facebook groups I am a member of. The problem with the Facebook groups is they are dominated by a few sellers who constantly fill me news feed with items they are peddling. Here is a much more attractive option for discussions, information and trading.

I am going to be honest. This is the only site I use now. Tried a few others, But once I found this site, and all the meebers and traders. I pretty much stopped going anywhere else. 

TCDB Number 1 all the way.

Upper Deck epack is the ony other one I use, have made some really cool trades there.