In French we used to have "le site du zéro". It was a very popular collaborative site with a ton of free courses for beginners in (mostly) programming.

Today it feels that it just became a somewhat bland and nothing-special corporate resource (OpenClassrooms), but it was once a vibrant community with it's own identity:

http://web.archive.org/web/20120309143317/http://www.siteduz...

On a completely different topic, https://www.jeuxvideo.com/ have long been (and still is) one of the most popular forums among young people in France.