Nostalgia for websites/forums from one's first internet experience

I did the same thing. I have a few gifs and images I saved from there before the forums closed. Read a few good fanfics on there too. I joined the fan created recreation of the boards, but lost interest eventually.

Ah, cool. I think starting out like that is what led to me lurking (and eventually posting) here. So, erm, thanks, Nintendo Power. c:

Not quite from my first experience online, but certainly a blast from the past, I'd been searching online for a while for an archive of the webcomic Pictures For Sad Children ever since I found out the author took the whole ship down, and I finally found it. This strip here is a good summation of the internet in general.

My first sites were... some chatroom thing I can't remember the name of that has long since closed, and one called "gURL.com" or something that was basically an adolescent/young girl hangout thing. And I've had Neopets accounts on and off for years, every so often I decide I want to play again, can't remember passwords from any of my old accounts, and make a new one. And I was hooked on those drag-and-drop doll sites and various roleplay forums over the years.

I've also had a Gaia account for 12 years now but I'd been on the 'Net a while at that point. Plus I'm still on my original account so it doesn't really count as "nostalgia" except in the "man I miss when things weren't super-inflated and announcements weren't always about the cash shop" way.

But the one I'm most nostalgic for is the Coolsig forums, later known as the Four Corners forums. Met one of my good friends there and we still keep in touch.

"gURL.com" That is actually an incredibly clever web address.

Also, what was that last forum dedicated to?

Well, Coolsig itself (which still exists, just without the forum) is a collection of funny signature lines for forums and email.

The forum was just kind of a general hangout type forum. There were forum games, discussion threads for... pretty much anything anyone wanted to make one for, etc. The thing that made it different/interesting was you'd start off with the title "Pond Scum" and you'd "evolve" based on your post count and the quality of your posts (you could get "kudos" for good posts and that would help your "evolution"). At a certain point you'd get to choose whether you wanted to be a "Woodsie", a "Waterling", or an "Earthor" and you'd get to a secret area of the forums reserved for one of those three groups as well as unlock the next batch of "evolution" steps. I was a Woodsie.

ETA: Huh, apparently gURL.com still exists but is now a general "girls and women of all ages" thing; it used to be mostly games and quizzes and articles directed at tweens/teens/college age girls. Looks like the site tried to "grow up" with the original userbase. Interesting.

edited 22nd Jul '15 11:50:15 AM by Ozbourne

(I did already post on this thread A While Ago, but I left out some important information...)

I first got online back in the mid-1990s, so it's hard to say what the very first site I ever saw was, but I remember using Yahoo! a lot (this was before decent search engines existed), and reading a lot of early Internet humor pages like the Useless Pages.

edited 4th Aug '15 3:46:57 PM by lee4hmz

The ones I remember most were random Beanie Babies websites from the late 90s. Because Comic Sans is the font used on their tags, this meant every Beanie Babies site had to use Comic Sans. I don't remember any of the names of the sites off the top of my head though. I remember one had a user submitted list of weird errors in manufacturing, like mismatched tags or factory defects.

Another early one for me was a webcomic, Not In My Backyard, which went under in 2001. That site ran banner ads for Neopets, which led to me discovering them too.

Other than that, I remember a joke site called Rinkworks (which is still barely around), and a bunch of random roadgeek sites full of now laughably amateurish road photos. A lot of them were hosted on Xoom, which went under with the dot com bust in 2001. It was so cool seeing random road ephemera from across the country, but now I can do that on Street View.

ETA: The one that opened the floodgates to me was a Michigan highway website my aunt found, currently hosted at Michigan Highways.org, but back then, hosted on AOL. I used to talk to its webmaster on the phone a lot until he got sick of me. It was his site that led me to discovering so many other roadgeek sites at the turn of the millennium.

I also went on Usenet from about 2000-2003. I frequented alt.tv.game-shows and misc.transport.road. I had a terrible reputation on both groups. The former got overrun with trolls and its membership moved to a forum, which is still active to this day.

edited 4th Aug '15 4:41:18 PM by Twentington

I miss Kiddonet. Does anyone besides me remember it? (Never liked Girl Sense, though.)

Name sounds familiar. What was it?

It was a late 90's to early 2000's website with fun activities for young kids. There was dress up doll games, quizzes, oekaki boards, and son on. It's on the Wayback Machine, at kiddonet.com, if you're interested.

I used to go on a young peoples' MMO forum called Toontown Central Forums from early 2011 to August of 2012. I remember writing a lot and actually being proud of some of it. A lot of the members I have fond memories of talking to because of how helpful they were and how they influenced my writing style. Then, I got perma-banned from the site, which sucked because I didn't know why so I couldn't defend it.

The site later shut down when Toontown Online closed and rebranded itself as MMO Central Forums. It's still up, and I debated for a while whether or not I should make another account (seeing as I doubt anyone would remember my lifeless presence), but looking through the forums, I noticed that almost everyone who knew me or considered me a friend was also gone. Therefore, I've gone on to bigger and usually better forums.

This is probably my favorite forum yet, but I'll also remember TCF for the fond memories of writing and reviewing silly stories that nine to fourteen year olds wrote. :)

Not related at all but I just looked at your page and you have really great taste in music.

Thank you, good sir.

(now back to serious discussion)

I think my first really substantial internet experience with a community was deviantart. I was like 12-13 at the time, I mostly just posted really bad animu art and commented on other artists of similar skill level; I stayed there for about 2 years I think, and made a few friends.

Eventually though I joined a videogame forum, which ended up making a pretty big difference in my life in a lot of ways (sad as that might seem). I was an active member for quite a few years when I finally left.

I actually ended up becoming friends with the moderation team and became a staff member myself (I was even promoted to administrator at one point). They ended up being my most substantial friends for a really long time, and I have a lot of good memories from those days, even if a lot of our behavior was, in retrospect, abusive, immature and reprehensible. I never had much in the way of self-confidence or companionship at that point in my life, so it was an unusual feeling to have my opinions being held in any particularly high regard. The people I met there ended up having a really strong impact on my opinions, taste in media, and overall outlook on life during my adolescence.

I eventually left for multiple reasons; the activity in the forum was overall going down and probably would never reach the "golden age" of the site (the 2007-2010 period, basically the first three years in which I was a member), and a lot of my older friends had moved on already. I felt it was my time to move on as well. Since then I've mostly drifted away from them and haven't spoken to most of those people in like what, 2-3 years at this point?

I don't feel particularly sad about it, I feel like it's a part of my life I'm content to leave behind. TVT is my main "internet hangout" these days.

edited 9th Feb '16 6:37:34 PM by wehrmacht

Whatever happened to Bonus.com?

@KiddoNet: -guttural screech-

I frickin' loved that site! Would use the doll things to make characters for my Digital Blue movies (which, in retrospect, were more often than not either cartoon fanfic, terrible original ideas or both).

There was also that glorious standby Nick.com, where I was once a frequenter of the Show Suggestions message board (under the names 'kidstreet2' and 'cameraf8ce'), which was basically a forum made just for the random TV ideas kids would come up with. Nick never actually used any of them for copyright reasons but it was still fun!

(Fun fact: one of my show concepts, Sal & Dave Heart NY, had at least 60-70% of the same idea as Austin and Ally, but, like, in 2004. Biggest differences were that I made the two leads twins and they both got famous after stealing the spotlight from a fading pop star on the in-universe equivalent to Rockin' New Year's Eve, making said pop star loathe them.)

TVT itself also makes me nostalgic; it wasn't my first real exposure to the True Internet (that would probably be Tumblr, which I joined a year prior at age 12) but it was the first place I knew of that let me become a recognizable figure within a community— I'll never forget having seen one of the 'Gush About Tropers You Like' pages with some of my friends from the time lamenting my disappearance during a lengthy grounding period. The Old Shame is real for here in particular, but right now I feel like it's better to keep it accessible for old times' sake. (Probably going to be gone once I try to, like, get a job or something, though. )

First two sites were coffeebreakarcade.com and Alfy's world (or something like that - its still around, but hugely different.) Both were Java and Flash game sites. Later, Miniclip. I especially loved Heli Attack 2 on miniclip.

My first forum was Gamefaqs, during the lead-up to Brawl's release.

Around that same time, I was making extensive use of Stumble Upon, which was how I found this very wiki.

Oh yeah, I remember when StumbleUpon was a big thing.

The computer lab at school wiped all the files every logoff, so I used to install Firefox and the SU toolbar every class :p

Heh, I remember in college one of the first things I did on the school computers is install Firefox on my account.

Does anyone remember Postopia?

First web-surfing experience/forum nostalgia, eh? Where to begin?

Long before becoming aware of this wiki's existence and during a time when Internet trolls were frowned upon (and haven't multiplied like a virus), I remember joining the forums of Ranma ½ fanfiction writer Hung "AnimeAddiction" Nguyen after reading a fanfic (Tekkadread) that crossed over the aforementioned series, Tekkaman Blade, and Vandread.

While I admittedly wasn't that well-versed with the characters of Ranma 1/2 (except for Ranma's water-based genderbending and the violent tsundere tendencies of Akane Tendo—which influenced my dislike of violent tsunderes and the Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male trope in general), I did like the fusion of the latter two sci-fi/mecha anime and enjoyed the harem antics. (As well as Ranma kicking Rabat's ass.) I guess it's because Rule of Fun was the basis of starting fanfics at the time, and Tekkadread was pretty fun to read.

I also remember getting an AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) account and chatting with fellow forumers there. But it's been a while since I last used it and AIM is probably six feet under by now.

While the forums still exist, new posts (about anything, really) from its remaining members only show up once in a blue moon. And I have a feeling AnimeAddiction is already busy with real-life matters. However, at least one of the members (who is also a fanfic writer) made it to the Fanfic Recs page of ''Ranma 1/2'' and even has a page for his fic.

Also, I remember surfing the old Anime Web Turnpike at around the same time.

But one of my true earliest memories of the Internet was playing the Toy Story 2 online game where you control Buzz in Al's Toy Barn sometime in 1999. If I remember correctly, the music had a gospel like tune to it with the music.

edited 6th Jan '17 9:02:52 AM by brb1006

I used to go on this Flash Game website called Shockwave a whole lot. I had a lot of fun with it, and I was quite devastated when I found out it was apparently bought out by Nick, of all things. It was renamed to "Nick Mom" for some reason.

There was also this really outdated educational website by the name of Star Fall. That's actually where I discovered Greek myth in the first place. Though the versions they had were heavily Bowlderised, since we all know how messed-up Greek Myth can be.

There's also You Tube, one of the first websites I went on. But that's obvious.