The forum was founded in April of 2018 with the explicit goal of creating a networking site for some of the most extreme and violent players in the far-right. In a write-up posted shortly after Fascist Forge went live, a founder who goes by the name Mathias wrote that the goal of Fascist Forge was to fill the void left by the takedown of Iron March —an infamous online meeting ground for fascists that went dark two years ago—and “continue where they left off.”

On Fascist Forge, Nazis urged each other to rape women, spoke about “direct actions”—in other words, terror attacks—shared manuals on how to create weapons, housed propaganda for numerous violent groups, discussed fascism in depth, and worked to radicalize all who viewed their words and images.

Iron March is where Atomwaffen—the neo-Nazi extremist group that killed five people in three separate incidents in 2017—was infamously founded, and the forum has been described by experts as an accelerant for the far-right.

Fascist Forge showed signs of growth initially. But now, less than a year after it was founded, the site is offline. The site’s registrar placed it into a status called “clientHold” on February 12. ClientHold status, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), effectively shuts down the website by telling a “domain's registry to not activate your domain in the DNS and as a consequence, it will not resolve.”

“It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes, non-payment, or when your domain is subject to deletion,” reads the description.