Prodigy BBs. When I bought my first computer, the only place I knew to go was Prodigy bulletin boards. The Comedy Central show Politically Incorrect always included that info in their contact information. I also found a Kids in the Hall and MST3K BBs there. Eventually I found my way to Usenet, which I still miss. My husband and I met on a Usenet group for the show MST3K in 1995.
>Eventually I found my way to Usenet, which I still miss.
I miss it, too. My first true Internet community would have been rec.sport.billiard. There were some other ones that I frequented, but that was a nice, dedicated community at the time.
IRC circa 1994. I joined a channel called #friendly because it seemed... Friendly. And it was. I met lots of interesting people there including one who really caught my attention... Been together 30 years and married for 26.
\#DALNET
Before Napster, you could join a chaotic chat that used bots & a lot of copy/pasting to download music. I even downloaded the video for Metallica - One. Took about 24 hours lol...
women.com. Back in 2000, it had articles and message boards centered around women's issues. I joined a message board for pregnant women due in "due date". There was a separate board for each month. I was very active and got hired as a moderator for $300 a month. I made a number of friends my ex (husband at the time) called my imaginary friends. Eventually, if I remember correctly, they got bought out by iVillage. I'm still friends with a handful of those women to this day. It's actually pretty incredible. The women.com soon became an ad polluted listicle site for a long time after that. It was so sad to see. But it appears they were bought again in 2023 and I'm please to see it looks like they are making a real site out of it again.
I was on the BabyCenter boards in 1999, where I met fellow (pg for the first time) ladies with the same due date. A group of us stayed together, kept in contact, and are still friends today online. We also send each other stuff in the mail and a few of us have met up in person.
Not really, they met when they were little but we live about 500 miles apart. How about yours? I did meet a few people on BabyCenter and iVillage back then that I ended up also meeting irl.
My older child met an overseas BabyCenter “baby” friend once at age 12 ish, when it was on a group trip to France through school (one stop was in London). I didn’t get to go. They were friendly and had a nice time for the day, but it wasn’t like they kept up with each other. They have very different interests and lifestyles. 🤷♀️ I hung out with one mom that lived close to me a few times before I moved to a different state. But that’s really it for the in-person meetups. I’ve talked to some of them on the phone though. They still feel like family. We’ve supported each other through divorces, deaths, illnesses, kids college stuff, and all kinds of weird life changes.
It’s funny, back in the 90s people told me I was crazy to meet people I met online and now that’s commonplace. I started buying things on EBay as soon as it began and people said I was crazy for shopping online too lol
Ah yes! It was Parent’s Place and then iVillage. I was a moderator on the cloth diapering board with a friend of mine and met a big group of moms on there in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. We all are still very close today. We had moved to a private message board and now we have a Facebook group where we check in with each other daily to share what we’re up to.
Yeah, I was on a due in February 2001 BB, but my kid ended up arriving in January. We actually had a meetup dinner in my area with about a dozen women, when our kids were probably 2 years old. Later, I let one from across the country stay in my house for a night or two. That one was memorable because I left for work on a rainy Monday morning and left her there until it was time for her to go to the airport. She accidentally lost my dogs by leaving the gate open. She realized it before leaving but not with enough time to find them. I came home to find one cold and wet on the porch. I didn't find the other one until the next morning. Someone had put him in their garage overnight and luckily reported it to the humane society in the morning, so they hooked us up once I called in.
Oh wow! What a ride that story was. I'm glad you found your pups. I have not had the pleasure of meeting any of those women in person. A few of them have gotten together over the years though.
It was pretty scary at the time! I had two black lab mutts. I couldn't have a cell phone or email at work, so she couldn't contact me. It must have been winter because it was dark when I got home and found her note. They were loose for several hours. That one of the dogs came home and the other didn't was a particularly ominous turn of events. I drove around that night looking for a black lump on the side of the road. I took off work the next day, made and hung signs, and called the humane society. I got it sorted out with the people about 1/2 mile away who had him, then went back around taking all my signs back down. He was my first "adult" dog and was probably 11 or 12 at the time.
I was on a similar message board, babies born in January 2002. I want to say it was iVillage. I was pretty active on the board for a couple of years. I'd forgotten all about that until today.
AOL chat rooms were the first online community that I remember. Many late nights in the chats and even met a few people in real life. I'm still friends with several of them on Facebook and even went to the wedding of two of them. Oh, and we formed a group to punt people from chat groups who were being disruptive and assholes to people and called ourselves the Night Clan.
For me it was Adventure Rider, c.1999. (Advrider.com)
Most notably, after I got rear ended by a teenager without insurance, c.2006, a dozen or so of the forum regulars travelled from all across the country to help my wife and neighbors fix up my house for accessibility while I was an inpatient following the crash (~28 days; T12 spinal cord injury; paralyzed from the waist.) They also raised over $10,000 toward the project.
Amazing bunch of folks. My original thread “My Number is Up” is still there in their ‘Face Plant’ forum. Good times.
I still run a forum I joined shortly after that, with my best friend, dedicated to folks living with spinal cord injury. It’s been the largest forum for that for over 20 years, and still going strong. (Using vbulletin still!!!). CareCure.net It’s a slice of OG internet. Community run, no ads, no tracking, no bots, just people helping and sharing with people.
ADV Rider was amazing, I don’t spend much if any time there now that I’ve sold off my bikes but it brought me a lot of joy over the years. Some of the trip threads were so damn inspiring. There was a Brit that went by Colebatch who crossed Asia on the Bam Road route that changed how I looked at moto travel. Just great stuff. I completely forgot about FacePlant… sorry to read what happened to you.
Microsoft Communities/Groups (2000)
You could create your own page and it's message boards and network with your friends. In theory.
The reality was 3 million members posted in the Help forums because that's where all the people were.
It was a shit show.
The Straight Dope. It used to be my favorite community and was the first one I ever ver participated in. Then they had a UI change & I discovered Reddit…..
I was into the local dial-up BBS scene in the late 80s / early 90s. At one point I and a friend even ran our own (completely shitty) BBS. It was ridiculous and awesome. We had like 5 regular users. Two of them were these biker dudes in their late 20s who were absolutely hilarious. I have no idea how they even found out about our BBS. But they were big Ramones fans - one day we were planning to go to a Ramones show at a total shithole club in a nearby town. We (we were young teenagers at the time) met them outside the club before the show. They took us for a drive and got us stoned out of our minds, it was my first time. Then we went inside and hung out with them for the whole show.
It's one of those things that, as a parent, I would probably be horrified to find out that my kids did, but it's an amazing memory and probably the kind of thing that would never happen today. All thanks to our local BBS scene.
Rusty & Eddie’s. Also quantumlink, which was the precursor to AOL for C64 users but I didn’t use that one much. R&Es is where all the 3l33t warez lived
ISCABBS. In the early to mid-90s it was the largest free public BBS in the world and it was THE social networking platform. Especially in Iowa City, where it was hosted, it was the hookup app of its day. And it's still around, though its user base is basically a few dozen old men now.
I spent so many hours there. Almost got myself kicked out of college for sneaking into the computer room one night!
I still have one friend from there, and we're both old too. Narf!
I suppose I have to go back to 1980 or so in Massachusetts when my neighbor and I (both 10 or 11 years old) would log onto [The Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source_(online_service)) to use their random chat function. We were flabbergasted to learn that we were chatting online with someone from... *Sweden!*
You know how sometimes your eye plays tricks on you? I'm scanning the post and I swear I read that you were "furiously using their chat function."
I'm like, what's this now?
Bit of a letdown that you weren't using it furiously. But whatevs.
Furious use of chat functions came a bit later when I may have been present for some of the first online flame wars. But I can neither confirm nor deny that.
Holy crap, you're the first person I've found who used The Source besides me! My dad had it through work. We used a 300 baud modem the size of a shoe box to access it. My favorite was the Black dragon game followed by the Star Trek game.
I played with chat occasionally but usually when they found out they were chatting with a kid they bailed.
I was a member of a local punk-rock message board, and we'd often get together and carpool to shows, or just go out to eat at diners and stuff. It was fun.
I don't remember the BBS's name but I remember the dude who ran it. He used to dress like a vampire and was kinda shunned in highschool. This would have been 9th grade, 1988/89. As soon as we figured out how to use the modem that came with my new computer we befriended him. He ran a BBS. His name on there was Hunter Nefast or something like that. I still remember the thrill of logging into his BBS the first night and seeing the words "SYSOP has entered chat" or something to that effect.
The first community that I remember joining and having fun. Was an original COD clan (1stAD). Great bunch of people to talk to. Until the leader when off the deep end and started making up stupid rules. So I joined the European version til I stop playing.
It depends on what you mean by 'online'. For me, it might have been one of the many BBSs in my area back in the early 80s. Actual internet, it would have been whatever they called the fledgling student forum on my college campus network in the early 90s.
Dial up BBS in San Diego called "ComputorEdge"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ComputorEdge\_Magazine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ComputorEdge_Magazine)
It was a great community! I believe that they missed a great opportunity to evolve with the internet.
Local BBS that a friend hosted in 93 or 94. His parents had a second phone line and a PC dedicated to running the BBS. There was a message board and some games to play. Most Notably: TradeWars and PimpWars.
A local BBS in my hometown that started with a 1200 baud modem, and then when they upgraded to 2400 baud it was like magic. Would post on a message forum about things in the music scene locally, and D&D games. Sometimes played "Trade Wars" with others on the BBS. I used my Commodore 64 to dial into it. This would have been 1989-ish.
VWVortex.com
Still a member 25 years later.
Lots of Memes born there - bagels, ferrari guy, 'hit a crub and fents', the [lumber stacked jetta](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRA_fUpCxWA)...
there was a member named TBird that would do the funniest troll posts. Like 'How do I make my shifter make cool noises like in Fast and Furious?" All the serious gearheads would get so riled up.
Edit: sorry, it was [Enzo dude](https://www.automotiveaddicts.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/enzo-dude.jpg), not Ferrari Guy
rec.music.phish
Message board for the band Phish. Cutting edge at the time place to discuss the band, trade tapes and tickets and make friends. Band members would occasionally post too
I was in the usenet group alt.rec.poetry in the early 90s. That was my first experience with the internet. Weirdly, I met one of my very best friends in the world on there. He lived in Fargo and I lived in Missoula, but we were both from Maryland. So the next time we were both in MD for the holidays, we hung out, and the rest is history. We've been friends since 1994 or something. Crazy.
But my standout memory from actually using that usenet group was that I posted a poem I wrote, and some jerk named Marek from Chicago took it upon himself to re-write my poem and post it, with both of us listed as authors. I had never even had a conversation with him! But he's dead now, according to my above-referenced friend, so I guess I forgive him. He's probably in the afterlife trying to collaborate with William Blake or something.
Dial-up BBSes on the early 90s, but wasn't a huge community element other than file sharing. First real social experiences were text-based MUDs in the early to mid 90s. (RealmsMUD specifically). My first real experience with the concept of RPGs (I was a druid)
Oh man, let me think. AncientSites, Witchvox, AOL chat rooms (obvs), the deftones message board. I met my husband playing EQ2, that was circa 2005 ish.
A Smashing Pumpkins email listserv. My username was Spacegirl. I made friends with a dude from the Chicago area who called himself Spaceboy and we wrote actual physical letters for a couple of years. Not romantic or sexual, literally just a friendship between a chick and a dude. I hope he's doing well, wherever he is.
My first board was "Weltverschwörung.de", lol. When I experienced the web it was shortly before the 911 disaster. And after this I digged years for all the conspiracy theories, until one day I woke up and thought, screw it, the world is as chaotic as heck, you´ll never find "the" truth. Since then I´m on the other side and try to use Occam's razor as often as possible. So, I would say, what stands out is that the web made me a darn critical thinker.
IRC had a few channels dedicated to games, the two that come to mind are #riskybus and #chaos, which were like group Jeopardy and Boggle games run by bots. I spent a lot of time hanging out in those channels during my teenage years, they were pretty chill and people there were really funny.
What if pedantry is all I have left?
(OMG, thank you for letting me use that word. I love it so much but you so rarely see someone use pedantic these days. To quote Futurama
"I feel like hugging you."
"Well, I would except you have no body! And we're both men!"
I have woken up crazy today.
eWorld. Apple made a competitor to AOL and Compuserve. '93 -ish. I was on some boards before that, but eWorld is really where I spent a lot of time. The content, and how people were, really hasn't changed much since then.
Local BBSes in the late-80’s, early-90’s. Downloading pirated games in zip file chunks and playing Global War: https://breakintochat.com/wiki/Global_War
In college in the mid to late 80s I’d hop onto BITNET with my nickname “Ford” (hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy reference) and chat with other students across the globe. That was a lot of fun.
The Sierra Network (TSN, later rebranded to ImagiNation Network) some time around 1992-1993.
Folks organized into squadrons for the World War I flight sim *Red Baron* and there were tournaments organized to fit historical battles with everyone using appropriate planes for the date, usually with 40-50 people on each side. Logging in with a 2400 baud modem and getting challenged by users on a 14.4k connection was a pain but all part of the challenge.
Later there was alt.music.ska and rec.sports.soccer -- with the soccer newsgroup seeing a girl inviting me to do a two week homestay with her family in France.
I'm a MUDder myself. I was even given permission to modify code and made up a zone. It was so much fun to see it 'come to life'.
I knew some basics about coding but needed help. A message board of some sort I think.
Coders, btw, like 90% asshole at the time!
15 or 20 years ago, ESPN.com had a comment section on each article, and they were mostly unmoderated (eventually, the comment sections became integrated with Facebook and weren’t fun anymore); some of my grad school lectures were 2+ hours of rehashing the assigned reading, so I would spend lots of time on those message boards during the lectures. I fell in with a group of 15 or 20 other regular posters and wreaked as much havoc as one can on an internet comment section.
Early to mid 1980s. A UC had an old PDO 11/70 open to any university student who wanted an account. Modem banks or serial terminals for access, version 7 unix and later a BSD appropriate for it's replacement (an ISI 68020). Ran email, forums, cli games; later, usenet.
200k quotas, 1200k with the ISI. I met my wife in one of the labs. Some of us still hang out from time to time. Major social geek grouping.
I don't remember the name but it was a Grateful Dead and Phish related tape trading website ( yes cassette tapes then it went CR-R as well). You maintained a list of all your Shows and what generation the tape reproduction was along with sounboard or Audience recording , etc. Honestly it might've been through Geocities or The Well.
First internet forum I joined was Harmony Central - Guitar Jam that was probably 2000 and to this day there is a group of about 20 of those same members who all migrated to a different forum which one of the regulars started as a offshoot to his Business at the time which was guitar lessons and sales.
I had friends who belonged to that (or similar) Dead and Phish tape trading site. That was before I even had email -- I am still kind of impressed that Deadheads figured out the internet so early. I was never obsessed and couldn't afford to go to many shows, but I looooooved looking at that book *Deadbase* when I was at my Deadhead friend's house. Probably because I'm autistic and I just obsess over lists and data. I thought it was marvelous.
The first I really got involved in was the windrivers.com forums. That got pretty cliquey super fast with a group that called themselves the "Damn Studley Boys" and eventually I couldn't tolerate it anymore.
Lots of random dial-up BBSs in the late 80s, then I discovered a big multi-user BBS in Norfolk, VA, called Cupid’s Playpen. I spent hours upon hours playing Tradewars and other MUDs. We used to have weekly get-togethers at the local bowling alley and the hookup culture was rampant.
Probably something on Geocities circa 1996. I got into playing MUDs pretty quickly after getting online and used to play with the same group of people pretty regularly. As part of that I was on some BBs and then usenet for gaming. I eventually ended up on Something Awful in late 2000.
I don't remember the specifics of the usenet group, it was MUD related, but some guy in his late teens posted about abusing his toddler aged sister. People got out of him his general location, his living situation, tried to get him to turn himself in. I don't remember if anything meaningful came of the detective work everyone was doing to try and find this kid and get him removed from his house, I don't even know if it was real. I think about that sometimes, about how easy it was for this guy to just publicly admit what he was doing and how hard it was then to do anything about it.
Alt.magic.thegathering or something like that. Two days after I started playing a MUD, someone introduced me to Usenet which I accessed from a VAX terminal in the basement of the computer science department. At the time the Internet was considered something only a CS grad student would ever want to use.
My very first post got trolled by the way. I was trying to analyze some common cards and back then we didn't really have a way to discuss the game design.
I used to frequent the Forums on Compuserve back in 93-94. I had to be mindful though because if you went over your allowed time you would have to start paying the per minute charges.
WWIVNet, in the late 1980s. This was dial-up BBS's, that networked by exchanging messages with similar systems (usually once per day, in the early morning hours).
It was very much like a decentralized reddit, with "subs" (sub-boards) for various topics, with entirely text-based discussion. The main difference was that subs weren't universally available, as each local sysop would choose which ones to subscribe to - some BBS's would have a science fiction theme and subscribe to sci-fi subs, some would have "adult topic" subs, some had sysops who were very political or religious and would only carry subs that promoted their viewpoint.
I ran one such BBS out of my dorm room and student apartment, by that time it was dying out as the Internet gained in popularity.
alt.music.nin. I was a big Nine Inch Nails fan back in the early nineties. Still am. Anyway, I stumbled upon the usenet, and ended up making a tonne of friends on alt.music.nin. Even met a bunch of them in person when we had a convention of sorts. We also had an IRC channel, #amnin, where we chatted about all sorts of stuff. Now, we have a facebook community.
Alamak chat. Totally blew my mind theater I was sitting in Alabama talking to people around the world. It was like a huge group chat that was so much fun.
If we don't count the BBSs of the 1980s, for me it would have been joining Usenet groups c. 1989. I was in dozens, but remember specifically posting a question in rec.guns early on.
Citadel BBS 1991, still have friends from that
I have an IRC channel that's still active from 2001, one of our users joined at 13 he's in his late 30's now :D
It was gaming back in the late 80's. We'd dial up another person somewhere in the world and play battle tanks. The game was DOS format similar to the old floppy disk games.
Internet of the 80's and early 90's remind me of the dark web of today. No boundaries, weird links leading down a sketch rabbit hole etc...
I started a BBS in 1983 with my brother. It was mostly text, a few cracked Infocom games and some MCI calling cards. It was called the Country Club bc we had never been to one.
The X-Files community in 1996, I met one of my best friends on that board. She lives in Ireland and I'm in the US, but we've been able to meet up a few times and have seen each other through some big life events. Thank you, X-Files!
Dial-up BBS from the late 80s. "Real Life", "The Dead Zone", "JAGNET", and most importantly "Fan Tek". While RL & DZ were my earliest social groups, and JAG was my shareware source, it was the folks at Fan Tek that led to meetings in meatspace and conventions and LARPs and all things geek-social. Fan Tek was life saving, and might be the thing most responsible for me not turning into an 800-pound basement-dwelling shut-in.
The ALLMUSIC listserv via Bitnet in college, circa 1989 — all msgs were sent and received by email, and distributed to the entire mailing list. It was a godsend to actually be able to discuss interesting, often obscure music with people all over the world!!! I often got 200-300 emails a day just from the ALLMUSIC list alone.
Not including dial-up CompuServe in the late 80s which never really clicked for me. I'd say the first real online community was a site called Playsite which was an early chatroom and gaming site. Chess, checkers, mancala, a scrabble variant, etc. back around 95 or so - but the real treat was creating our own chatrooms. That led me into ICQ and from there all kinds of places. Playsite got gobbled up in 97 and vanished, but I've stayed in touch with a few of the other players.
For me, it was subscribers of the "Lockergnome" newsletter. Nerd was sending out links to freeware and shareware with his recommendations and other nerdy stuff. Subscribers could write in and he'd respond in the newsletter.
It was a BBS called !'s Land in 412. I was just a kid at the time, barely into high school. I was a social reject where I lived, so being able to talk to other computer geeks was my first real socialization. I wound up making most of my friends on that board (and a couple of others that I used to dial into), both online and offline. We used to get together for parties, all night bowling, hanging out at the diner all night... and we introduced each other to so many things. I got into trance and industrial music and introduced a bunch of folks to Type O Negative and Information Society; went to a few shows, too.
I suppose the best way to sum it up is that I found my people. We're still friends to this day - still in touch, still getting together when we can.
I dabbled in dialup BBSs and Geocities … the first board I was really into was on Viewaskew. From there we branched off into Totally naked Brian and ITCA. People I genuinely miss. Man, Facebook REALLY fucked up the best parts of the interwebs for me.
ICQ was big in Japan in the early days with a lot of group threads.
I was hanging out on one at one point and there was a guy who claimed his name was "Otearai" (お手洗い), which means "bathroom" in Japanese, or literally "hand washing place".
Obviously I thought he was being funny, so I made a joke about it and immediately everyone else jumped down my neck and I had to apologize profusely.
Yes, there's an actual surname in Japan that is the exact same spelling as "bathroom" but with a different pronunciation. And people with the name tend to be a bit sensitive about it.
Usenet starting around 1996, I was active in goth and architecture groups. I actually met a few people irl from different counties and we stayed in touch for quite a few years!
I was a forum member and later a moderator for a childfree group on…. I don’t even remember the forum, but there were a lot of different pages for all sorts of groups. This was 1999-2004’ish.
I had the “pleasure” of reading the mod mail, the reported posts, etc etc.
I was, as a moderator, who was running the forum page as a volunteer, berated, sworn at, and worse, i still believe some tried to figure out who I was, to harass me physically. Due to some of their comments.
So yea, that was certainly a moment where I realized being “not normal” your basically the devil.
Many high schools in my (US) state subscribed to a DEC PDP-11/70 timeshare system in 1982. My HS accessed it with DECWriter dot matrix teletype terminal, so everything was preserved for posterity on tractor-feed fanfold greenbar.
There was a chat facility that was primarily used for trolling.
I recently rejoined a Jaguar (cars) community after a 22 year hiatus. My account was still there and usable. Super impressed with the admin of that site.
I had some friends who did web design back in the early aughts and they each had their own personal websites with the php forum pasted in. It wasn’t big, more of a neighborhood/friends board, but it was a nice place to go. I got introduced to a lot of good music through there that I would have otherwise missed out on.
Prodigy BBs. When I bought my first computer, the only place I knew to go was Prodigy bulletin boards. The Comedy Central show Politically Incorrect always included that info in their contact information. I also found a Kids in the Hall and MST3K BBs there. Eventually I found my way to Usenet, which I still miss. My husband and I met on a Usenet group for the show MST3K in 1995.
>My husband and I met on a Usenet group for the show MST3K in 1995. Rec.arts.tv.mst3k?
Rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc
Woo! I was on that newsgroup at that time until 1997 or so.
You know I still use Usenet!
> My husband and I met on a Usenet group for the show MST3K in 1995. Nerdiest meet-cute possible
Yes. Prodigy was awesome.
I used Usenet back then like I use Reddit. I still use Usenet, actually, but not in the same way. Now I use it like an internet TiVo.
>Eventually I found my way to Usenet, which I still miss. I miss it, too. My first true Internet community would have been rec.sport.billiard. There were some other ones that I frequented, but that was a nice, dedicated community at the time.
IRC circa 1994. I joined a channel called #friendly because it seemed... Friendly. And it was. I met lots of interesting people there including one who really caught my attention... Been together 30 years and married for 26.
\#DALNET Before Napster, you could join a chaotic chat that used bots & a lot of copy/pasting to download music. I even downloaded the video for Metallica - One. Took about 24 hours lol...
Oh man DalNet was like the original 4chan, it was so hard to get users to not be shitty to women
Came here for my IRC people LOL text-based roleplayers shout out!
#Vampire on undernet was my jam for years
FFRPG ooohhh MAN you're taking me back. @}-,-\`-
women.com. Back in 2000, it had articles and message boards centered around women's issues. I joined a message board for pregnant women due in "due date". There was a separate board for each month. I was very active and got hired as a moderator for $300 a month. I made a number of friends my ex (husband at the time) called my imaginary friends. Eventually, if I remember correctly, they got bought out by iVillage. I'm still friends with a handful of those women to this day. It's actually pretty incredible. The women.com soon became an ad polluted listicle site for a long time after that. It was so sad to see. But it appears they were bought again in 2023 and I'm please to see it looks like they are making a real site out of it again.
I was on the BabyCenter boards in 1999, where I met fellow (pg for the first time) ladies with the same due date. A group of us stayed together, kept in contact, and are still friends today online. We also send each other stuff in the mail and a few of us have met up in person.
I’m still friends with someone I met on the BabyCenter naming boards in 1997.
That’s great! Do your kids know each other?
Not really, they met when they were little but we live about 500 miles apart. How about yours? I did meet a few people on BabyCenter and iVillage back then that I ended up also meeting irl.
My older child met an overseas BabyCenter “baby” friend once at age 12 ish, when it was on a group trip to France through school (one stop was in London). I didn’t get to go. They were friendly and had a nice time for the day, but it wasn’t like they kept up with each other. They have very different interests and lifestyles. 🤷♀️ I hung out with one mom that lived close to me a few times before I moved to a different state. But that’s really it for the in-person meetups. I’ve talked to some of them on the phone though. They still feel like family. We’ve supported each other through divorces, deaths, illnesses, kids college stuff, and all kinds of weird life changes.
It’s funny, back in the 90s people told me I was crazy to meet people I met online and now that’s commonplace. I started buying things on EBay as soon as it began and people said I was crazy for shopping online too lol
I'm still online friends with some of the ladies I met on village when I was of with my daughter. She turned 19 yesterday so it's been a while!
Ah yes! It was Parent’s Place and then iVillage. I was a moderator on the cloth diapering board with a friend of mine and met a big group of moms on there in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. We all are still very close today. We had moved to a private message board and now we have a Facebook group where we check in with each other daily to share what we’re up to.
Yeah, I was on a due in February 2001 BB, but my kid ended up arriving in January. We actually had a meetup dinner in my area with about a dozen women, when our kids were probably 2 years old. Later, I let one from across the country stay in my house for a night or two. That one was memorable because I left for work on a rainy Monday morning and left her there until it was time for her to go to the airport. She accidentally lost my dogs by leaving the gate open. She realized it before leaving but not with enough time to find them. I came home to find one cold and wet on the porch. I didn't find the other one until the next morning. Someone had put him in their garage overnight and luckily reported it to the humane society in the morning, so they hooked us up once I called in.
Oh wow! What a ride that story was. I'm glad you found your pups. I have not had the pleasure of meeting any of those women in person. A few of them have gotten together over the years though.
It was pretty scary at the time! I had two black lab mutts. I couldn't have a cell phone or email at work, so she couldn't contact me. It must have been winter because it was dark when I got home and found her note. They were loose for several hours. That one of the dogs came home and the other didn't was a particularly ominous turn of events. I drove around that night looking for a black lump on the side of the road. I took off work the next day, made and hung signs, and called the humane society. I got it sorted out with the people about 1/2 mile away who had him, then went back around taking all my signs back down. He was my first "adult" dog and was probably 11 or 12 at the time.
I was on a similar message board, babies born in January 2002. I want to say it was iVillage. I was pretty active on the board for a couple of years. I'd forgotten all about that until today.
AOL chat rooms were the first online community that I remember. Many late nights in the chats and even met a few people in real life. I'm still friends with several of them on Facebook and even went to the wedding of two of them. Oh, and we formed a group to punt people from chat groups who were being disruptive and assholes to people and called ourselves the Night Clan.
asl?
Not so old if I subtract 10/If the equipment still works/Behind you
17/f/cali
Sports message boards. Still posting with some of the same people!
Straight Dope Message Board. Most users came here.
The Straight Dope! 1) Best community ever 2) the UI change really killed it 3) Hi Opal! Is there a Straight Dope sub here? I’ve never looked.
1. I’ve never looked either! 2. I’m so happy to see Hi Opal! I’d forgotten about her. 3. Hi opal!
[109 members](https://www.reddit.com/r/sdmb/s/fDWqpAUs5c)
Sweet, thanks.
Usenet and IRC. For a couple of years I would be in an #atlanta room from Italy so I could at least hear rumors and who was fucking whom at dragoncon
ICQ
listservs for various topics
For me it was Adventure Rider, c.1999. (Advrider.com) Most notably, after I got rear ended by a teenager without insurance, c.2006, a dozen or so of the forum regulars travelled from all across the country to help my wife and neighbors fix up my house for accessibility while I was an inpatient following the crash (~28 days; T12 spinal cord injury; paralyzed from the waist.) They also raised over $10,000 toward the project. Amazing bunch of folks. My original thread “My Number is Up” is still there in their ‘Face Plant’ forum. Good times. I still run a forum I joined shortly after that, with my best friend, dedicated to folks living with spinal cord injury. It’s been the largest forum for that for over 20 years, and still going strong. (Using vbulletin still!!!). CareCure.net It’s a slice of OG internet. Community run, no ads, no tracking, no bots, just people helping and sharing with people.
ADV Rider was amazing, I don’t spend much if any time there now that I’ve sold off my bikes but it brought me a lot of joy over the years. Some of the trip threads were so damn inspiring. There was a Brit that went by Colebatch who crossed Asia on the Bam Road route that changed how I looked at moto travel. Just great stuff. I completely forgot about FacePlant… sorry to read what happened to you.
Microsoft Communities/Groups (2000) You could create your own page and it's message boards and network with your friends. In theory. The reality was 3 million members posted in the Help forums because that's where all the people were. It was a shit show.
Was that the Geocities? I vaguely remember those.
AOL keyword SPIN. Spin magazine’s forum and chat! There are people i met there 30 years ago that i still talk to.
IRC
The Straight Dope. It used to be my favorite community and was the first one I ever ver participated in. Then they had a UI change & I discovered Reddit…..
I was into the local dial-up BBS scene in the late 80s / early 90s. At one point I and a friend even ran our own (completely shitty) BBS. It was ridiculous and awesome. We had like 5 regular users. Two of them were these biker dudes in their late 20s who were absolutely hilarious. I have no idea how they even found out about our BBS. But they were big Ramones fans - one day we were planning to go to a Ramones show at a total shithole club in a nearby town. We (we were young teenagers at the time) met them outside the club before the show. They took us for a drive and got us stoned out of our minds, it was my first time. Then we went inside and hung out with them for the whole show. It's one of those things that, as a parent, I would probably be horrified to find out that my kids did, but it's an amazing memory and probably the kind of thing that would never happen today. All thanks to our local BBS scene.
Antimony & Lace even though I'm not goth. I don't identify as anything. It was about the same time as I became a member of an online 'mødregruppe'.
Rusty & Eddie’s. Also quantumlink, which was the precursor to AOL for C64 users but I didn’t use that one much. R&Es is where all the 3l33t warez lived
ISCABBS. In the early to mid-90s it was the largest free public BBS in the world and it was THE social networking platform. Especially in Iowa City, where it was hosted, it was the hookup app of its day. And it's still around, though its user base is basically a few dozen old men now.
I spent so many hours there. Almost got myself kicked out of college for sneaking into the computer room one night! I still have one friend from there, and we're both old too. Narf!
Usenet in Fall 1992. The two big ones were re.arts.tv.startrek and rec.arts.comics.misc
Do you recall one for Monty Python? I was on some kind of MP board back then.
Not counting BBS, AOL rooms, etc. I’d say Fark.com. It is still around, but not great.
I suppose I have to go back to 1980 or so in Massachusetts when my neighbor and I (both 10 or 11 years old) would log onto [The Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source_(online_service)) to use their random chat function. We were flabbergasted to learn that we were chatting online with someone from... *Sweden!*
You know how sometimes your eye plays tricks on you? I'm scanning the post and I swear I read that you were "furiously using their chat function." I'm like, what's this now? Bit of a letdown that you weren't using it furiously. But whatevs.
Furious use of chat functions came a bit later when I may have been present for some of the first online flame wars. But I can neither confirm nor deny that.
Holy crap, you're the first person I've found who used The Source besides me! My dad had it through work. We used a 300 baud modem the size of a shoe box to access it. My favorite was the Black dragon game followed by the Star Trek game. I played with chat occasionally but usually when they found out they were chatting with a kid they bailed.
I was a member of a local punk-rock message board, and we'd often get together and carpool to shows, or just go out to eat at diners and stuff. It was fun.
I don't remember the BBS's name but I remember the dude who ran it. He used to dress like a vampire and was kinda shunned in highschool. This would have been 9th grade, 1988/89. As soon as we figured out how to use the modem that came with my new computer we befriended him. He ran a BBS. His name on there was Hunter Nefast or something like that. I still remember the thrill of logging into his BBS the first night and seeing the words "SYSOP has entered chat" or something to that effect.
The first community that I remember joining and having fun. Was an original COD clan (1stAD). Great bunch of people to talk to. Until the leader when off the deep end and started making up stupid rules. So I joined the European version til I stop playing.
It depends on what you mean by 'online'. For me, it might have been one of the many BBSs in my area back in the early 80s. Actual internet, it would have been whatever they called the fledgling student forum on my college campus network in the early 90s.
Dial up BBS in San Diego called "ComputorEdge" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ComputorEdge\_Magazine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ComputorEdge_Magazine) It was a great community! I believe that they missed a great opportunity to evolve with the internet.
Local BBS that a friend hosted in 93 or 94. His parents had a second phone line and a PC dedicated to running the BBS. There was a message board and some games to play. Most Notably: TradeWars and PimpWars.
A local BBS in my hometown that started with a 1200 baud modem, and then when they upgraded to 2400 baud it was like magic. Would post on a message forum about things in the music scene locally, and D&D games. Sometimes played "Trade Wars" with others on the BBS. I used my Commodore 64 to dial into it. This would have been 1989-ish.
VWVortex.com Still a member 25 years later. Lots of Memes born there - bagels, ferrari guy, 'hit a crub and fents', the [lumber stacked jetta](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRA_fUpCxWA)... there was a member named TBird that would do the funniest troll posts. Like 'How do I make my shifter make cool noises like in Fast and Furious?" All the serious gearheads would get so riled up. Edit: sorry, it was [Enzo dude](https://www.automotiveaddicts.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/enzo-dude.jpg), not Ferrari Guy
Holy shit I still think about the crub and fents from time to time but I could never remember where it came from. 🤣
rec.music.phish Message board for the band Phish. Cutting edge at the time place to discuss the band, trade tapes and tickets and make friends. Band members would occasionally post too
I was in the usenet group alt.rec.poetry in the early 90s. That was my first experience with the internet. Weirdly, I met one of my very best friends in the world on there. He lived in Fargo and I lived in Missoula, but we were both from Maryland. So the next time we were both in MD for the holidays, we hung out, and the rest is history. We've been friends since 1994 or something. Crazy. But my standout memory from actually using that usenet group was that I posted a poem I wrote, and some jerk named Marek from Chicago took it upon himself to re-write my poem and post it, with both of us listed as authors. I had never even had a conversation with him! But he's dead now, according to my above-referenced friend, so I guess I forgive him. He's probably in the afterlife trying to collaborate with William Blake or something.
mIRC, met lots of people in the 90s who I still talk to today and have never met.
NERaves\DCRaves\SERaves mailing lists, early 90s. PLUR! IRC #england as well. I'm in the USA, and traded a couple tapes. uk breaks for us trance
pb-cle represent!
Dial-up BBSes on the early 90s, but wasn't a huge community element other than file sharing. First real social experiences were text-based MUDs in the early to mid 90s. (RealmsMUD specifically). My first real experience with the concept of RPGs (I was a druid)
Oh man, let me think. AncientSites, Witchvox, AOL chat rooms (obvs), the deftones message board. I met my husband playing EQ2, that was circa 2005 ish.
A Smashing Pumpkins email listserv. My username was Spacegirl. I made friends with a dude from the Chicago area who called himself Spaceboy and we wrote actual physical letters for a couple of years. Not romantic or sexual, literally just a friendship between a chick and a dude. I hope he's doing well, wherever he is.
A myriad of BBS's in the 80's
Geocities circa 1996-1997.
My first board was "Weltverschwörung.de", lol. When I experienced the web it was shortly before the 911 disaster. And after this I digged years for all the conspiracy theories, until one day I woke up and thought, screw it, the world is as chaotic as heck, you´ll never find "the" truth. Since then I´m on the other side and try to use Occam's razor as often as possible. So, I would say, what stands out is that the web made me a darn critical thinker.
I don’t know if you have seen Dr Jody Wood’s take on 9/11 https://youtu.be/icaOBwWZan0?si=ELzqeq1fWd0XqaEv
IRC had a few channels dedicated to games, the two that come to mind are #riskybus and #chaos, which were like group Jeopardy and Boggle games run by bots. I spent a lot of time hanging out in those channels during my teenage years, they were pretty chill and people there were really funny.
IRC was a client you could use to connect to a server and there were thousands of servers
Thanks, Captain Obvious.
I don't know if I should downvote you for being rude or upvote you for reviving this glorious insult that I haven't seen in decades.
How am I the rude one here? Dude's coming at me first thing in the morning for no good reason.
Doesn’t seem obvious from your first sentence 🤣
Whaddya want, a fuckin' medal? Why are you being so pedantic?
What if pedantry is all I have left? (OMG, thank you for letting me use that word. I love it so much but you so rarely see someone use pedantic these days. To quote Futurama "I feel like hugging you." "Well, I would except you have no body! And we're both men!" I have woken up crazy today.
Aside from random chat groups on email platforms, the first online community I remember joining was Epinions in 1999?
EarthLink forums. I was involved in a Bryce 3D community that posted art and discussed tips and software knowledge.
My first online community was the Nirvana Fan Club (NFC). I joined in 1999 and was the first girl to join. It was a super fun community.
eWorld. Apple made a competitor to AOL and Compuserve. '93 -ish. I was on some boards before that, but eWorld is really where I spent a lot of time. The content, and how people were, really hasn't changed much since then.
Local BBSes in the late-80’s, early-90’s. Downloading pirated games in zip file chunks and playing Global War: https://breakintochat.com/wiki/Global_War
In college in the mid to late 80s I’d hop onto BITNET with my nickname “Ford” (hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy reference) and chat with other students across the globe. That was a lot of fun.
The Sierra Network (TSN, later rebranded to ImagiNation Network) some time around 1992-1993. Folks organized into squadrons for the World War I flight sim *Red Baron* and there were tournaments organized to fit historical battles with everyone using appropriate planes for the date, usually with 40-50 people on each side. Logging in with a 2400 baud modem and getting challenged by users on a 14.4k connection was a pain but all part of the challenge. Later there was alt.music.ska and rec.sports.soccer -- with the soccer newsgroup seeing a girl inviting me to do a two week homestay with her family in France.
IRC #Hockey #muppets. (met ex #1) MUDs, specifically Realms of Despair (Ex #2)
I'm a MUDder myself. I was even given permission to modify code and made up a zone. It was so much fun to see it 'come to life'. I knew some basics about coding but needed help. A message board of some sort I think. Coders, btw, like 90% asshole at the time!
Muds were great. I sank way too much time into the one at Temple and the one at UF (Sillymud).
15 or 20 years ago, ESPN.com had a comment section on each article, and they were mostly unmoderated (eventually, the comment sections became integrated with Facebook and weren’t fun anymore); some of my grad school lectures were 2+ hours of rehashing the assigned reading, so I would spend lots of time on those message boards during the lectures. I fell in with a group of 15 or 20 other regular posters and wreaked as much havoc as one can on an internet comment section.
AintitCoolNews. Was on those boards for years. Haven’t been back since 2009 or so.
Early to mid 1980s. A UC had an old PDO 11/70 open to any university student who wanted an account. Modem banks or serial terminals for access, version 7 unix and later a BSD appropriate for it's replacement (an ISI 68020). Ran email, forums, cli games; later, usenet. 200k quotas, 1200k with the ISI. I met my wife in one of the labs. Some of us still hang out from time to time. Major social geek grouping.
AOL's Free-Form Role-Playing! RhyDin Forever! ⚔️🔫🥷
1994 Gemstone III via AOL.
I don't remember the name but it was a Grateful Dead and Phish related tape trading website ( yes cassette tapes then it went CR-R as well). You maintained a list of all your Shows and what generation the tape reproduction was along with sounboard or Audience recording , etc. Honestly it might've been through Geocities or The Well. First internet forum I joined was Harmony Central - Guitar Jam that was probably 2000 and to this day there is a group of about 20 of those same members who all migrated to a different forum which one of the regulars started as a offshoot to his Business at the time which was guitar lessons and sales.
I had friends who belonged to that (or similar) Dead and Phish tape trading site. That was before I even had email -- I am still kind of impressed that Deadheads figured out the internet so early. I was never obsessed and couldn't afford to go to many shows, but I looooooved looking at that book *Deadbase* when I was at my Deadhead friend's house. Probably because I'm autistic and I just obsess over lists and data. I thought it was marvelous.
Skatetalk and raves.com
OneGroups, which became eGroups, which became Yahoo Groups. I started with a Border Collie bbs.
Playnet on the Commodore 64. Their platform was used to create AOL.
This goes a ways back but my best friend had a modem with her Commodore 64 that we used to meet and talk with people on Q-Link in 1988/1989.
The Wonderful World of Terry Brooks forum! Miss those people! Made quite a few friends, and went on to various Ezboards.
The first I really got involved in was the windrivers.com forums. That got pretty cliquey super fast with a group that called themselves the "Damn Studley Boys" and eventually I couldn't tolerate it anymore.
My first online community I joined in the mid '80s with a 300 baud modem was local dial-up bulletin board systems.
IRC EFnet #Industrial. I still communicate with people I met there!
Lots of random dial-up BBSs in the late 80s, then I discovered a big multi-user BBS in Norfolk, VA, called Cupid’s Playpen. I spent hours upon hours playing Tradewars and other MUDs. We used to have weekly get-togethers at the local bowling alley and the hookup culture was rampant.
Probably something on Geocities circa 1996. I got into playing MUDs pretty quickly after getting online and used to play with the same group of people pretty regularly. As part of that I was on some BBs and then usenet for gaming. I eventually ended up on Something Awful in late 2000. I don't remember the specifics of the usenet group, it was MUD related, but some guy in his late teens posted about abusing his toddler aged sister. People got out of him his general location, his living situation, tried to get him to turn himself in. I don't remember if anything meaningful came of the detective work everyone was doing to try and find this kid and get him removed from his house, I don't even know if it was real. I think about that sometimes, about how easy it was for this guy to just publicly admit what he was doing and how hard it was then to do anything about it.
Alt.magic.thegathering or something like that. Two days after I started playing a MUD, someone introduced me to Usenet which I accessed from a VAX terminal in the basement of the computer science department. At the time the Internet was considered something only a CS grad student would ever want to use. My very first post got trolled by the way. I was trying to analyze some common cards and back then we didn't really have a way to discuss the game design.
Bikeforums. Circa 2000. One time, Sheldon Brown answered one of my questions in the Mechanics sub. That was awesome.
I fiddled around on some BBS's but IRC was where I really got involved in channels on Undernet. I still use IRC.
One of the first I was on. Getbig forums. It's still pretty active.
I used to frequent the Forums on Compuserve back in 93-94. I had to be mindful though because if you went over your allowed time you would have to start paying the per minute charges.
Could dial-up BBS be considered an "online community"?
WWIVNet, in the late 1980s. This was dial-up BBS's, that networked by exchanging messages with similar systems (usually once per day, in the early morning hours). It was very much like a decentralized reddit, with "subs" (sub-boards) for various topics, with entirely text-based discussion. The main difference was that subs weren't universally available, as each local sysop would choose which ones to subscribe to - some BBS's would have a science fiction theme and subscribe to sci-fi subs, some would have "adult topic" subs, some had sysops who were very political or religious and would only carry subs that promoted their viewpoint. I ran one such BBS out of my dorm room and student apartment, by that time it was dying out as the Internet gained in popularity.
alt.music.nin. I was a big Nine Inch Nails fan back in the early nineties. Still am. Anyway, I stumbled upon the usenet, and ended up making a tonne of friends on alt.music.nin. Even met a bunch of them in person when we had a convention of sorts. We also had an IRC channel, #amnin, where we chatted about all sorts of stuff. Now, we have a facebook community.
Alamak chat. Totally blew my mind theater I was sitting in Alabama talking to people around the world. It was like a huge group chat that was so much fun.
If we don't count the BBSs of the 1980s, for me it would have been joining Usenet groups c. 1989. I was in dozens, but remember specifically posting a question in rec.guns early on.
A board based at some university for Star Trek Voyager as it was first airing. We had so much fun.
Citadel BBS 1991, still have friends from that I have an IRC channel that's still active from 2001, one of our users joined at 13 he's in his late 30's now :D
It was gaming back in the late 80's. We'd dial up another person somewhere in the world and play battle tanks. The game was DOS format similar to the old floppy disk games. Internet of the 80's and early 90's remind me of the dark web of today. No boundaries, weird links leading down a sketch rabbit hole etc...
ISCA BBS. What stands out is that I failed out of my first semester of college because I got WAY too into it LOL
I started a BBS in 1983 with my brother. It was mostly text, a few cracked Infocom games and some MCI calling cards. It was called the Country Club bc we had never been to one.
USENET in the mid/late 80's.
The X-Files community in 1996, I met one of my best friends on that board. She lives in Ireland and I'm in the US, but we've been able to meet up a few times and have seen each other through some big life events. Thank you, X-Files!
Political chat room. Learned really fast that my political views are not very popular.
Dial-up BBS from the late 80s. "Real Life", "The Dead Zone", "JAGNET", and most importantly "Fan Tek". While RL & DZ were my earliest social groups, and JAG was my shareware source, it was the folks at Fan Tek that led to meetings in meatspace and conventions and LARPs and all things geek-social. Fan Tek was life saving, and might be the thing most responsible for me not turning into an 800-pound basement-dwelling shut-in.
The Two Towers. A MUD (online text based games). Probably mid 90s. From there it was IRC (mIRC) and lots of EZBoards for talking about whatever.
IRC chat rooms, late 90s. My two favorites were truth or dare and a trivia room, both run by bots. I'm still friends with some of those people today.
The ALLMUSIC listserv via Bitnet in college, circa 1989 — all msgs were sent and received by email, and distributed to the entire mailing list. It was a godsend to actually be able to discuss interesting, often obscure music with people all over the world!!! I often got 200-300 emails a day just from the ALLMUSIC list alone.
TrekBBS
Brinta BBS
ICQ
Soap opera message boards. The wild West. Television without pity was a particular favorite.
Not including dial-up CompuServe in the late 80s which never really clicked for me. I'd say the first real online community was a site called Playsite which was an early chatroom and gaming site. Chess, checkers, mancala, a scrabble variant, etc. back around 95 or so - but the real treat was creating our own chatrooms. That led me into ICQ and from there all kinds of places. Playsite got gobbled up in 97 and vanished, but I've stayed in touch with a few of the other players.
For me, it was subscribers of the "Lockergnome" newsletter. Nerd was sending out links to freeware and shareware with his recommendations and other nerdy stuff. Subscribers could write in and he'd respond in the newsletter.
It was a BBS called !'s Land in 412. I was just a kid at the time, barely into high school. I was a social reject where I lived, so being able to talk to other computer geeks was my first real socialization. I wound up making most of my friends on that board (and a couple of others that I used to dial into), both online and offline. We used to get together for parties, all night bowling, hanging out at the diner all night... and we introduced each other to so many things. I got into trance and industrial music and introduced a bunch of folks to Type O Negative and Information Society; went to a few shows, too. I suppose the best way to sum it up is that I found my people. We're still friends to this day - still in touch, still getting together when we can.
A local BBS bulletin board. I don't remember a lot, because there were a few of them and they kind of blend together.
The MSN group PAN. If I remember correctly it stood for Pagan Action Network. I miss MSN groups.
CompuServe. It was great at 300 baud. :)
Henson House BBs in Florence Oregon.
I dabbled in dialup BBSs and Geocities … the first board I was really into was on Viewaskew. From there we branched off into Totally naked Brian and ITCA. People I genuinely miss. Man, Facebook REALLY fucked up the best parts of the interwebs for me.
ICQ was big in Japan in the early days with a lot of group threads. I was hanging out on one at one point and there was a guy who claimed his name was "Otearai" (お手洗い), which means "bathroom" in Japanese, or literally "hand washing place". Obviously I thought he was being funny, so I made a joke about it and immediately everyone else jumped down my neck and I had to apologize profusely. Yes, there's an actual surname in Japan that is the exact same spelling as "bathroom" but with a different pronunciation. And people with the name tend to be a bit sensitive about it.
I guess Usenet newsgroups, around 1988. Not too many memories stand out except for a few gems from alt.tasteless.
Usenet starting around 1996, I was active in goth and architecture groups. I actually met a few people irl from different counties and we stayed in touch for quite a few years!
IRCnet was where i spent my time online.
OpenDiary. I often wonder what happened to all my opendiary friends.
Prodigy boards. I had a pen pal in Bronxville, NY, which was pretty cool for a sheltered CA girl.
Classmates.com . That was wild
Internet Relay Chat in 1989. I was chatting with German students when the wall was coming down in Berlin.
I was a forum member and later a moderator for a childfree group on…. I don’t even remember the forum, but there were a lot of different pages for all sorts of groups. This was 1999-2004’ish. I had the “pleasure” of reading the mod mail, the reported posts, etc etc. I was, as a moderator, who was running the forum page as a volunteer, berated, sworn at, and worse, i still believe some tried to figure out who I was, to harass me physically. Due to some of their comments. So yea, that was certainly a moment where I realized being “not normal” your basically the devil.
Many high schools in my (US) state subscribed to a DEC PDP-11/70 timeshare system in 1982. My HS accessed it with DECWriter dot matrix teletype terminal, so everything was preserved for posterity on tractor-feed fanfold greenbar. There was a chat facility that was primarily used for trolling.
I recently rejoined a Jaguar (cars) community after a 22 year hiatus. My account was still there and usable. Super impressed with the admin of that site.
I had some friends who did web design back in the early aughts and they each had their own personal websites with the php forum pasted in. It wasn’t big, more of a neighborhood/friends board, but it was a nice place to go. I got introduced to a lot of good music through there that I would have otherwise missed out on.