what are your earliest memories of forums?

[emilyd]

what are your earliest memories of forums.

were they on proboards or somewhere else?

first forum I ever joined was a kids forum for news and current events.

it was only open in the evening after school between 4  and 8 PM. enjoyed it a lot.
(I was around 9 or 10, and used it for a good few years) 

what about you?     

[Caajscot (John)]

AOL Chat Forum was the very first one I ever used but it cost a bomb and you had to have a separate phone line because if you used your home phone no one could call you if you were using it for the Net, there were no mobile phones in my days when the Net first came out.

[Former Member]

I remember the days of rapidforum

[Krumm]

2004, with Proboards. I was in 7th grade and my English teacher created a discussion board for us to do certain assignments and such. I joined on the first day and started posting a lot. He eventually made me a Global Moderator, ans from that point on I was hooked. That forum was a proboards33 server. My first forum was proboards36.

I still go to several forums on the daily. City-data forum, Americanwx forum, Urbanplanet forum mostly. Daily! They're all quite active.

[Ayen]

The first forum I ever joined was a ProBoards forum and the second largest Harry Potter role-playing forum on the server at the time, Our Hogwarts. Later I would go on to make my own Harry Potter forum called "New Hogwarts" that would last for a year before dying, have a small resurrection and then get buried for good. From there I moved on to other things.

[wildmaven]

Starting in the 80s, I ran my own bulletin board system (bbs) through my computer, a second phone line in my home and a 300baud modem. My forum became pretty popular in the late 80's into the 90's where I lived. The bbs had forums, games people could play, chat rooms, and files they could download. I still have friends from those days.

When people called, I could see what they were doing on my computer and it was always a treat for a bbs visitor if the sysop (system operator) jumped in and said hi. I loved doing that. We were kind of minor celebrities in the computing world, haha.

At the time, it was not common for a female to run a bbs, so I like to think I was a pioneer in forum history.

Good memories.  

[Combo]

My friends and I back in about 03 wanted to start a "club" that wasn't on MSN messenger. This somehow lead me to Proboards where I signed up for our first forum. Once I set the forum up, I had no idea how to customize it which led me to PBS, and eventually to Solid Snake Designs. After getting lost in the coding databases there I befriended Thom who was known as Nadim in those days, and began frequenting his forum Zanmato Design. A good 5 years of my life was spent daily on Proboards, and I made a lot of friends, most of whom we've all lost contact over the years, but every once in a while I pop in here to stroke my nostalgia a bit.

[📚 Dianne 📚]

I joined certain author's forums, and I apparently became popular, so I opened my own forum (Proboards of course) and found my way here. Since I became a member here in '06 that means I would have found the author's forums sometime in the late (ish)'90's

[Darkmage4]

Team GameTalk was the first forum type message board. I was 11 at around 2001. It's also when I discovered ProBoards around 2002. Just shy of the age. I had permission but was 12 at the time. From 2002 to 2010 is when I did anything with forums. Role playing mainly of Final Fantasy. Forum was Final Fantasy Nation, and I ran that for many many years! With over 500 people, and 100 active RPrs there for some time. Until it died after 3 years. Then I switched to a different forum service, which then gained more popularity. Then in 2010. Finally died and layed to rest for good. I had 2 other RP forums on PB, and they thrived. Until I lost interest completely.

Then decided to just stop roleplaying end of 2010, and gave up forums all together after that.

Then 2014 I was on an off this forum for a few years, until I completely left for 4-5 years, now I'm back. Lol.

[Oakey]

I think it was around 2006 that I started on roleplay forums. I was 10 years old at the time (lol). Not sure exactly what type of forum it was, I really can't remember. But it was a Warriors RPG that was almost... blog-style? Each post you made showed up above the last post with your username and time stamp. It had tons of different pages that you could go to and post to. Very strange now that I'm thinking back. I tried googling to figure out what kinds of forums were popular back then, but couldn't find anything. But I have very distinct memory of the font being like 15px and Comic Sans. Painted something or other?

I ended up on Proboards immediately after that with like two friends on a Warriors site that was abandoned, no staff access, just us poking around, very much just being kids — roleplaying two-liners about all sorts of things (Warrior cats, dragons, Twilight-esque shenanigans) and talking about whatever we liked and what happened in our daily lives, all-caps and 10 bazillion exclamation points. Basically screaming at each other through text about procrastinating homework, getting grounded, and when they were next going to log into Runescape. It was such a fond time in my life, I still know the URL and visit every now and again when the nostalgic urge strikes me. I'm friends with those two people on Facebook still, 16 years later.

I made an entire ProBoards site dedicated to my 5th grade boyfriend once? Just a place where we could chat (because I had the absolute worst dial-up and no cell phone) and I thought forums were the coolest. I emailed him the link and he broke up with me within the week (understandable lol). I cringe to high heaven when I think about it now.

[Vampire Zen]

My first forum was the official PlayStation one. It was way back in '07 when I joined, and was very addicted to it. A member there that I became friends with hosted his role playing forum on Proboards, which is how I discovered the platform.

[Kitty Katt]

wildmaven,

Do you remember the name of the software you used for your BBS? A friend of mine ran a BBS in the 90's using RemoteAccess.

[Cade]

My first forum was High School Story forum, which I joined in 2014. I was a regular member over there for two years before the administration started abandoning the forum and we as members were left without guidance or any active staff. Then they suddenly deleted the forum altogether in 2018.

I was also a member of the Geometry Dash forum from 2016-2018 and was an active Global Moderator and then Administrator there for a little over a year. I also created my own forum in 2016, however this never took off, and I'm still trying to raise activity there after being away from forums for 4 years.

[angeldeb82]

I remember when I started going to the TV.com forums and the IMDb forums, and it was in 2005, I believe.

[wildmaven]

Nov 15, 2022 12:47:19 GMT -8 Kitty Katt said:

wildmaven ,

Do you remember the name of the software you used for your BBS? A friend of mine ran a BBS in the 90's using RemoteAccess.

I don't remember the first software, but I upgraded to Wildfire after a few years.