Hi –
Regarding a lot of folks here knowing of them, or much of them:
I’d say, without really knowing for sure, they had more hits and active posts than atheistzone. I am not saying they were “better”, but just establishing they seemed pretty “successful”. If the site owner had wanted to build it up further, rather than letting it die, I’m guessing they could have done so. I do think over the years they had a sort of issue with quality of discussion and I ended up having atheistzone recommended to me by someone at agnostic.com, a few years ago.
Regarding their domain name:
Yes, it bothered me too, and others, but most of the folks there seemed to be atheists (as I am) and just put up with the two site names (agnostic.com and humanist.com) depending on where they were coming from. There also seemed to be the usual small percentage of bad actors, whether theists on a mission to pretend to be atheists and infiltrate, or small numbers of other types of deliberately false folks (IMO).