what was your earliest forum experience?

[emily]

What was your earliest forum experience



My earliest forum experience was a news site for kids. It was owned by the BBC, and would only open to people after school



Fun though. Welcome reprieve from homework. lol

[jenny]

My earliest experience was back in the 90s, on two different websites.

One was the talk forums of the Guardian newspaper, which I haunted regularly right up until the QI forums launched, and then it got too much to keep up with. However, I (indirectly) met my second husband through that forum so I am grateful to it, and still online friends with many people I met on it.

The other was a website called Writers BBS, which was the old bulletin board style of talk forum (much like this one but with fewer knobs on), which eventually died, but I also have kept many online friends from that one, and also met some in real life - in fact I met one of them last week when he and his wife stopped off in Portland on their vacation and we went out to dinner together.

[Bondee]

Mine was either QI or Avalanchers.

Avalanchers was dedicated to the work of a musician called Justin Broadrick - his home studio and record label were both called Avalanche - but it often branched off to other topics, more music, films, literature, etc. It disappeared from the internet a few years back, but the community continued on Farcebook.

QI... well, I don't know what happened to that one.

[tetsabb]

Aug 30, 2024 18:19:12 GMT jenny said:

The other was a website called Writers BBS, which was the old bulletin board style of talk forum (much like this one but with fewer knobs on), 

Are you calling many of us 'knobs'?

😉

[amanda]

My first time on the internet was in 1999 at a library training session. I discovered the youth orchestra that way and spent five years with them.

My first forum though was a bit later and I discovered this QI one in about 2013 after a mention of it after a tv show (which we get haphazardly here in Aus, random episodes shown whenever our ABC chooses)

[celebaelin]

All Things Philosophical on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the Angel: The Series bit was added later) which I first posted to some time in 2002.

www.atpobtvs.com/

My most recent post to that site was 7 years ago and was about that other Whedon masterpiece Firefly.

www.voy.com/14567/1/25419.html

Incidentally I think Whedon was handed a pretty raw deal by a vindictive ex-wife but I guess the post divorce earnings from the Avengers films will ease the blow a bit (even if his fee for 'Avengers 2' was less than the $100M some claimed he would be getting).

My net experience as a whole started when I was doing research at UEA (1997) and was mainly searches of protein sequence comparisons, restriction endonuclease sites and academic papers; obviously the porn and the cat gifs came later.

[ali]

A BBS called The Gnome At Home sometime in the mid-80s. IIRC my username was 'Diamond'. Dial-up access was a bit to expensive for me to spend much time on it.

[pdr]

There were a few specialist dial-up BBS services (mainly just self-help groups for various bits of hardware) but after that my first real "forum" experience would have been in the early/mid 80s on various Usenet "newsgroups" - sci.mil.naval (because my job at the time was in underwater sonar systems), sci.physics (general interest and the origin of the un matched "ravioli rail gun" post that explained relativistics so well to so many), sci.aeronautics (primary interest, moderated by my one-time friend Mary Schaefer who was a world-reknowned flight dynamicist and originator of the "Lift Demons & Thrust Pixies" aerodynamic model which illustrates the difference between modelling & simulation). There were others, but they've faded into the mists of time and I've slept since then.

After them in the late 80s came the Compuserve private network (aka "CIS" or "CI$" by its detractors) which was sort of like AoL for grown-ups. CIS had "communities" for various special interests, and these communities often had "archives" for uploading stuff of interest. Many of them were dormant, but their archives still existed so I used to use them as my personal storage space and uploaded my struff before switching the computer off - like having a "huge" hard disk. You have to remember that in those days few home computers had hard disks of any kind, and "floppy" disks were expensive, unreliable and only stored 180k to 360k of data each, so this was a big benefit. People these days don't get the pain of direct dial-up networks and off-line readers - you tell that to t'young'n's today and they won't believe you...

Then in the mid 90s the advent of the Intel 386Sx processor and cheap MFM/RLL hard disks made home computers more affordable, and good old AoL broke the agreement by unleashing their clueless hoards onto the World Wide Web (how many people even today appreciate the difference between the "internet" and the "web"?). For decades afterwards standard forum-speak for saying somethi9ng deliberately stupid was to include it in "mode=AoL" tags. I think it was probably also the origin of the whole "me2" thing because AoLers were famed for constantly cluttering up conversations with replies saying just "me2!". People who use the "#me2" motif might reflect that it was originally a characteristic of a cretinous twat with delusions of sentience...

After that came the web-hosted forums (mostly using php-based databases) on every special interest under the sun (and even ones that aren't like the Flerfers!) and QI would have been one of these, but we're probably talking late 90s before they became common so that doesn't count as "earliest" in the context of this thread.

PDR

[emily]

Aug 31, 2024 10:07:29 GMT celebaelin said:

All Things Philosophical on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the Angel: The Series bit was added later) which I first posted to some time in 2002.

www.atpobtvs.com/

My most recent post to that site was 7 years ago and was about that other Whedon masterpiece Firefly.

www.voy.com/14567/1/25419.html

Incidentally I think Whedon was handed a pretty raw deal by a vindictive ex-wife but I guess the post divorce earnings from the Avengers films will ease the blow a bit (even if his fee for 'Avengers 2' was less than the $100M some claimed he would be getting).

My net experience as a whole started when I was doing research at UEA (1997) and was mainly searches of protein sequence comparisons, restriction endonuclease sites and academic papers; obviously the porn and the cat gifs came later.

Thank you for the blast from the past



I have a lot of fond memories of voy. Had no idea that place was still going    

[jenny]

Aug 30, 2024 19:52:27 GMT tetsabb said:

Aug 30, 2024 18:19:12 GMT jenny said:

The other was a website called Writers BBS, which was the old bulletin board style of talk forum (much like this one but with fewer knobs on), 

Are you calling many of us 'knobs'?

😉

Not many, no.

[crissdee]

My first experience was the aforementioned QI site, which I discovered during a very boring afternoon at the branch office of the ticket machine company where I earned my daily groat. I was clarifying some details about the use of Teflon in rifle and pistol ammunition, and its effect on body armour.

[RLDavies]

I was in some Usenet groups, long ago in the before times. I definitely remember a lively group about language, and I seem to recall I was in one or two others but don't remember what they were.

My first actual forum, as far as I can remember, was the Hounds of the Internet, a Sherlock Holmes group. Good people, and the group hit the right balance of being serious enough about the subject while still having plenty of fun. My handle there was Trout in the Milk, and I still occasionally use Trout as a nom de web.

[crissdee]

Surely for a Holmes site it should have been "parsley in the butter"....

Source suze?.....

[suze]

The Six Napoleons, although the parsley/butter incident was a mention in passing and actually happened in another case which Dr Watson never wrote up.