For about twenty years, 1992 through 2012 or so, there was an invite-only "LifeCA" Conway's Life mailing list where a lot of the in-depth research and collabora

For about twenty years, 1992 through 2012 or so, there was an invite-only "LifeCA" Conway's Life mailing list where a lot of the in-depth research and collaboration tended to happen. That was certainly a good surviving pocket of Life-hacker subculture. The point of keeping the LifeCA list private was to dodge spammers and keep the signal-to-noise ratio high. This very successfully avoided the terrible drowned-in-spam fate of the Usenet group comp.theory.cell-automata, so that was good -- but it made it quite difficult for newcomers to figure out who to talk to, or what interesting problems had been solved or were still open. When the conwaylife.com forums showed up in 2009, it turned out that there were much better ways of suppressing spam, and a lot of new energy entered the field.