Your First Forum?

[Saint_]

In the early days of the internet, there weren't any true "forums." Just things called "Bulletin Boards" or just "Boards" for short.

My first one was hosted by the company Gameshark, which made cheat devices for the Playstation 1 and 2. Their boards were names "Codejunkies." They still exist, although they no longer have forums per se. Just hardware helplines.

Codejunkies

You could go to their boards and get new codes for the devices or post them. Most of the guys were either gamers, coders, employees, hackers, or all of the above.

That was the first time I ever saw avatars implemented, (I've stil got it and I uploaded it below!) or post counts, or flame wars, or heard the term "mods." I quickly realized that there was a pecking order and constant political machinations going on. The board eventually had to get rid of post counts, as they began to take on status meanings. Then, after an especially brutal flame war that eventually engulfed almost every user on there, they kicked out the public and only reserved it for their own employees. I miss it sometimes, and I still am in contact with one or two of the original members.

After that I moved to a series of actual forums:

Duros - A UK forum also a little dedicated to gamers, but hosted by an individual.

Madchatters - A small forum similar to FG.

Another forum I can't remember - So if someone else remembers tell me.

And finally to ForumGarden in it's early and tumultuous years.

Do you remember your first online forum?

Attached files

[tude dog]

It was a CNN news posting board. They never gave a reason but I was booted. I believe somebody took something personal.

'Gator's Place'. Actually had a few regular poster some very good. It is now long gone.

One I remember, Omni Chat which still exists. It went down hill with some posters using codes to disrupt and destroy posting and disrupt posters computers.

[Snowfire]

This was pretty much the first conversation forum I joined, bar a Pink Floyd Forum that lasted a week or two. Far to anal, despite me being a Floyd fan.

I've been here, in two different guises, since March 2005. Dabbled in a couple of others but not to ant great extent.

It's very quiet here nowadays. A lot of guests read what we have to say but there was a time when it was a stretch to keep up with the traffic of posts and ranged from very fluffy to raging.

Never boring though

[Bryn Mawr]

I started on a bulletin board called TransWorld that ran out of a guy in Bristol's front room. It was in the days of 300/1200 baud modems and you logged in to download recent posts and then again to upload your replies - they also held the local repository of shareware.

After that, my next experience was ForumGarden.

[AnneBoleyn]

It was right after my mother died & I had my first PC. I didn't want to feel the same loneliness I felt after my husband died, & deliberately googled such a site. It was (& IS) After-Death Communication (ADC Message Board). ADC Message Board

I made quite a few friends on that board, & although I haven't been there in years, I just now checked it out & there are still people on that board that I knew.

[Bruv]

It would appear I am a forum junky then.

I have been a member and mod of quite a few forum/forai since getting my first PC.

I am currently a member of several, most are rarely visited, one has 5 or 6 members and hardly any traffic these days.Another I pop into and occasionally contribute, another, the far right one, I have never posted because my thoughts are likely to get me banned, and I see my membership as research or educational.

A couple are help forum for several different things, my ISP's a PC forum, and Ubuntu.

A couple have closed down from lack of interest............you can hear echoes of people tiptoeing about in this one recently, hopefully it is just the Christmas holidays.

[ZAP]

I stumbled upon my first forum while I was searching information on a musician I knew. It was run by the daughter of his drummer and it had members all over the world. Many forums, music, gardening, cooking, entertainment, sports, everything you might want and we had a lot of good contributing members. I was a mod o on two: The Unexplained which dealt with everything paranormal; UFO's, Past life Regression, hauntings, out of body experiences, etc.. The other was devoted to music of all kinds I met a lot of good friends on that site.

[LarsMac]

I started out in some online user groups back in the late 80s while going back to college. That grew into the usenet. My first actual forum was one for the Entropia project, a MMO based in Sweden.

Wandered through quite a few forums over the years, but this has become my favorite.

[FourPart]

I first came online with my first PC when W95 was the new State of the Art OS. My ISP at the time was LineOne. LineOne had great chat rooms & forums - an excellent community. Then Tiscali took over, and after a while they closed down the chat facility, and then set about closing the forum down as well. However, on the protest of the users they allowed it to continue, although under the administration of some of the Community. After that things went downhill as the new Admin got power mad & everyone steadily began to leave. Then TalkTalk took over and although TalkTalk still have a forum network, there's absolutely no Community there - it's more like a Blog Board.

[Snowfire]

Having thought about it, my first foray into a chat room/forum was via a p2p music site, when illegally downloading music was all the rage. Audiogalaxy was one of the better ones

[Wandrin]

I started with usenet and the Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) around '85. The Well is still alive and kicking.