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I remember being a small child posting to forums I had no business posting to, asking obnoxious questions about building websites or talking in IRC.
I remember always expecting a response that wasn't very happy with me. You have to start somewhere right?
Does FIDOnet count? Will you settle for USEnet?
Of course, I don't have experience with those so sharing your experience is even more valuable.
Joined a RuneScape clan as a kid. They had made their own forum site. I posted only in bright pink by wrapping my text in [color=#f19] [/color] or something. And of course we all had cool signatures lol. They had an IRC channel too that I hung out on all the time. To this day we're still together, just on Discord now. I like to think of them as my Internet Family.
My family had a Mac when I was little. One afternoon I ended up in a Windows tech support forum not understanding that it was connected to other people. I typed "Microsoft sucks" and managed to post it as a thread. Someone called me a troll.
My interactions with the internet haven't changed much since then.
I remember spending days agonizing over my avatar and my signature, creating animated gifs (from scratch, frame by frame in GIMP) for my "siggy". I remember being weirdly proud of my post count on several forums, and getting excited any time I hit a new rank.
I also remember that they were more tight-knit communities, too. There are people I met of forums back in the day that I still think about, despite having lost touch 15 years ago. Nothing else has really filled that niche the same way forums did, sadly.
Oh, and I remember having my Geek Code in my signature! I'm sure that will ring a special brand of nostalgia for some people.
Oh wow, I'd forgotten all about geek code.
I wish I could find my old code, so I could compare it to today. So many +'s would turn to -'s haha.
I'm so glad signatures are no longer as prevalent.
Honestly I completely agree, but I still miss them.
Neopets was probably my first time delving headfirst into forums. It was a neat thing where you can join guilds, sometimes super niche ones where everyone is just as into the thing as you are, and just talk to similar-minded people.
It was a cool feeling as someone from a rural town in the middle of Canada.
My daughter joined Neopets in its early days, when she was about 13 or 14. She's 34 now and still active there.
I don't think I ever delved I to their forums. Or if I did it was too early of a memory to recall. I know I was on ign and smash forums.
I started on mailing lists in the mid 1990s. I forget the name of the platform I started on* but it got taken over by eGroups and then Yahoo, and started to suck a bit after that. Basicaly, you'd go to the website to find groups to subscribe to, and all the content would come to you by email. You reply by email, and your reply went to everyone subscribed to that particular group. It was crude but efficient, and I really miss some of those communities.
Creating a silly sig (signature) for a web forum (gimptalk?). I think they had a specific sub forum for sig critique.
newgrounds flashbacks
I cut my teeth on Usenet so web forums always seemed so backwards and limiting compared to that. My earliest experience of being an actual user of them was probably the eurogamer forums and a few proboards "free" forums hosted by a few websites in the early-mid 00's and still it just felt so clunky!
I think I used prodigyβs Usenet reader to post questions in the mortal kombat group. People used to make up fake fatality combo codes that I would try for hours!
The amount of PokΓ©mon cheats I would write down from the library...
phpBB forums, with special titles and ranks. Cause- having colorful ranks under your name was cool at that time.
Absolutely. They were a lot of fun at the time. I still actually use one phpBB forum.
When I first found reddit (around 2012) it had a good amount of picture and video posts, but people often made text posts. I recall it being completely full of not just regular media, but psycho shit too: goatse, broken jar in the butt guy, posts on r/drugs about people ingesting whatever they could get their hands on, etc. I think it was really the first website I encountered where you could find forums for anything; you could go from browsing r/WTF one minute to r/aww the next and forget about all the crazy shit you just witnessed.
phpBB forums, probably about some cartoon I liked. It was truly fun