Stories and artifacts from small internet communities

[Never Scored]

I was on a general forum around 2005-2006 geared toward my local area that skewed extremely young. I was 21 or 22 and I was in the top end in terms of age. I would say the average poster was maybe 17 or 18. Anyway, there was this guy in his 30s who was very vocal about the fact the he was a virgin and insisted that he had never tried because he was asexual. Kind of a Movie Bob looking type. He gained a reputation for creepily coming onto teenaged girls after they posted high angle, myspace style emo pics of themselves (think boxxy type girls). He's in his 40s now and I hear he's a virgin to this day.

I was on a Nintendo related forum around the time Gamecube came out where this one guy had a huge animated gif for his signature. The gif was so big and it had so many frames, it would make a typical computer of the time struggle a little, and people were complaining about it. Some joker made a thread where he just posted the picture over and over. I opened it and my computer slowed to a crawl until I closed the window. They ended up deleting the thread and banning buddy who posted the picture a bunch of times.

 

[Temporal Refugee]

I remember visiting a specific hentai site for a year or two once puberty had really kicked into high gear. Decent place, had a lot of content available for free with some stuff made specifically for the site behind a paywall. For reasons I don't want to get into (power level) I ended up more or less dropping out of school as a teenager and had nothing better to do than dick around on the computer all day, at which point I discovered this site had a forum. After digging for content there for a while, I ended up posting in a few threads (I was totally 18 you guys) and discovered that, for a pack of sexual deviants, the citizenry of said forum were actually really, really nice people.

I spent most of my free time for probably close to a solid year downloading and uploading content to this forum, and carrying on some pretty awesome conversations with the people there. Made a couple of friends there I still think about sometimes today, despite having lost touch with them years ago.

Oh, and the owner of the site had it in his head that different romanizations for the same Japanese terms (things like 'r'/'l', 'o'/'ou' etc) applied to certain genres etc had radically different meanings, categorized things there using these weird definitions, and simply would not believe the dozens of us who tried to tell him otherwise. He was a pretty nice guy, but I couldn't help but laugh at that random prideful refusal to admit a misunderstanding of something so silly.

It looks like the domain is parked now, which makes me sad. It's stupid expensive, or else I may be tempted to buy it up and open a new forum to try and get the band back together.

 

[Pissmaster]

I remember visiting a specific hentai site for a year or two once puberty had really kicked into high gear. Decent place, had a lot of content available for free with some stuff made specifically for the site behind a paywall. For reasons I don't want to get into (power level) I ended up more or less dropping out of school as a teenager and had nothing better to do than dick around on the computer all day, at which point I discovered this site had a forum. After digging for content there for a while, I ended up posting in a few threads (I was totally 18 you guys) and discovered that, for a pack of sexual deviants, the citizenry of said forum were actually really, really nice people.

I spent most of my free time for probably close to a solid year downloading and uploading content to this forum, and carrying on some pretty awesome conversations with the people there. Made a couple of friends there I still think about sometimes today, despite having lost touch with them years ago.

Oh, and the owner of the site had it in his head that different romanizations for the same Japanese terms (things like 'r'/'l', 'o'/'ou' etc) applied to certain genres etc had radically different meanings, categorized things there using these weird definitions, and simply would not believe the dozens of us who tried to tell him otherwise. He was a pretty nice guy, but I couldn't help but laugh at that random prideful refusal to admit a misunderstanding of something so silly.

It looks like the domain is parked now, which makes me sad. It's stupid expensive, or else I may be tempted to buy it up and open a new forum to try and get the band back together.

Everyone there must have had post-nut clarity

 

[Syaoran Li]

I started to go online around 2003 as a kid but I didn't have an email address and we had shitty dial-up internet since we lived in a really poor rural redneck area. So I mostly would just lurk and look up whatever random subject interested me.

Some of my earliest fond memories of the internet as a kid was The Simpsons Archive, especially the "Episode Capsules" that detailed every episode of the first twelve seasons plus the first few episodes of the thirteenth season. It's more or less been completely abandoned and it was in a state of decline even before I began lurking there but I think it's still online.

There was also TV Tome, which later got bought by CNET and became TV.com and there was also Movie Tome, which is completely gone. I think TV.com still kept all of the archived material from TV Tome on their site but I'm not even sure if TV.com still exists.

I liked to lurk the forums on GameFAQs, IMDB, and Neoseeker and would occasionally post on the Neoseeker forums that allowed guests to post. It was crazy but fun, sorta like watching a disaster movie. Part of me wonders if me spending my formative online years lurking the total nuthouse that was the IMDB forums and laughing at the trainwreck has something to do with me eventually becoming a Kiwi.

I remember reading Wikipedia articles for fun as a kid back in the 2000's, usually because I was totally bored and there wasn't much else to do. Wikipedia was dumb and spergy back then but it was a lot less political and more of a "anyone can put anything up there and often do" TV Tropes vibe. There were policies against vandalism back in 2005, but it was not politicized and usually was limited to a few sections of the site while lower priority articles were kept unchanged for years.

Fanfiction.net was another favorite of mine as a kid.

 

[OneMillionRPM]

Back in the early-to-mid 2010s, there was a site called MalwareUp run by the youtubers Rogueamp and Danooct1 (technically Dan was only a mod, but his larger following attracted most of the userbase). Since the two did videos over viruses and such, naturally it attracted a lot of skiddies. They'd come into the chat, make asses of themselves, and if we found them particularly funny we'd immortalize them in the log archive (mirror).

There was one guy called Nas49Razing, who said so much weird shit that the archive has a whole folder just for him. He wound up leaving after a couple of pranks that freaked his parents out, one being a package of anal beads sent to him, and the other being a voicemail offering him some crack. Later on someone modeled a chatbot after him, using quotes from his logs to respond appropriately to certain keywords.

In mid-2015, there was an incident regarding resident serb and longtime user Endejan. Long story short, he got a girlfriend and stopped hanging out with the rest of MU's clique, because he now saw himself as more mature than them. This is despite being 15-16 at the time when most of the oldfags were in their 20s. This prompted Amp, Dan, and another mod named WIN2K3R2 to make a parody of Real Muthaphuckkin G's dissing Dejan. It has to be seen to be believed:

But at least that had effort put into it. The same couldn't be said about local wigger TJ (aka 2Chainz aka Mr_1Take aka whatever rapper he was obsessed with that year), who made a bunch of musical shitposts that Amp made a channel for.

Amp took the site down sometime in the late 10s, don't exactly know when. All I know is that Dan and Amp got slower on their uploads, and that likely impacted activity on the site. From what I gather, Amp and his buddies moved to Discord, some other users (mainly the weebs) moved to a site called Flashii, and Dan's left their circle entirely. Oh, and Win's a tranny now. Goes by Winona, which speaks volumes.

 

[Regenbogen]

back in 2015 i was part of a forum and server called moon central that was about moonman and i met a lot of weird people
a newfag woman came in and i bullied her all the time and she had a lot of tranny friends
she got married to a guy in the server called discordian she already had kids tho
civil war happened in the server and forums over the production of moonman songs
turns out her kids were half asian and this discordian guy was raising her children

the end

 

[The Bovinian Derivative]

I was a part of a Jedi Academy clan and that game was the single most comfy TPS game ever made. Since everyone and their mother played that game for years half the people would just stand on the side of the arenas and talk with each other. The game had private chat, group chat, clan chat, it was basically an IRC but with a lightsaber game attached. I spent almost all of my free time playing that game and talking with all sorts of people about random stuff. Then The Old Republic came out and half the clan emigrated there and the other just scattered in the wind. Still talk with one guys though, so at least got that.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Hung out on insular rom scene boards and irc a lot as a teenager. This was before console exploitation was really a big thing, so there was a big mix of oldschool Amiga/PC scene people, hardware hackers and people just looking for free games and as a whole both were great places to just hang out and shoot the shit about emulators and hardware.

One of the constant fixtures of both places were posters who couldn't speak english well repeatedly asking for roms of games that were scheduled to be released in the next month or two well before said roms had any chance of appearing. Figuring out weird homebrews to send them disguised as roms was a perennial competition between the reverse engineers in the channel and the star crowning moment of the GBA era was someone figuring out the compression that the GBA video carts used and constructing a very special rom that looked very much like Metroid Fusion until you hit start and it promply became low-res chinese VHS-looking pornography of a man attempting unsuccessfully to cram a rather large bullfrog into a woman's asshole.

You'd think the word would spread after a few hours, but no. This single act of trolling generated a solid week of salt and that rom spread far enough that it got blacklisted in several rom-renaming tools.

 

[Disgruntled Pupper]

Back in 2006, after the 4chan city flash got posted to Newgrounds and the mods broke rules 1&2 by putting it on the front page, I got VERY buttmad at all the newfags. I simply had to get anyway from the insufferable newfags and the massive explosion in popularity 4chan was going through. So I set off to find a smaller, more underground place to call my internet home, and ended up on a couple of 4chan spin-offs. Or more accurately, 2chan and 2channel spin offs, since the two primary ones were heavily based in ASCII art, especially shift_JIS and associated characters like Mona, Shii, Giko neko, etc.

Looking back the culture was... fucking weird, honestly. It was like if you took SA and 4chan, added LJ roleplaying, sprinkled some Newgrounds and early Gamefaqs, and wrapped them all up in an obsession with Japanese internet culture and memes. It was pretty fun, and there's still injokes and threads I think of and laugh at.

As for artifacts, some of you may remember (probably with some cringe) this guy: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
According to know your meme he came from some Finnish image board, but he didn't. He came from one of the websites I'm talking about. So did the majority of all those le funny emoticons that were all the rage on tumblr in 2011. Actually, looking back, both websites had a surprising amount of influence on subsequent internet memes.


( ﾟ ヮﾟ) So yeah that's my story
( ˃ ヮ˂) Release the emergency mittens!

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

The Quake 1 multiplayer community was pretty fun and it coincided with the arrival and spread of ICQ so it was possible to meet and keep up with people through matches if UIDs were exchanged(I had a six figure UID, impressed?).

It also made it easy to set up matches or spread the word that a good high level server had four spots open. Met a bunch of people through Quake & the primordial social media of the time and we arranged meetups a couple of times(it was usually 7-10 internet buddies meeting for the first time over some food and beer). Those could be funny if hypothetical player 'Amboo Lance' turns out to not only be 14 but also a girl while everyone else is a dude between 18 and their late 20's. You would think that barely being a teenager would be an issue when going to a bar or a pub, but no.

One guy that was temporarily in my clan was a pain in the ass, speaking of 14 year olds, he would angry-CoD-tween rage at us for not winning and even disconnect if things didn't go the way he wanted. He wasn't even good and there were no ladder/leaderboard to affect his 'rank' in the beer league style tournaments we played.

 

[Stasi]

I was part of a small online gaming community in the early 2000s, we're talking probably a couple of hundred users at most, maybe less than 50 active at any one time. It was a old invisionfree forum if I remember right.

With such a small user base it was easy to get to know people and some legit friendships were formed among the userbase, people would meet up IRL for lan parties and organise paintballing trips and whatnot. Sadly as the big social media monoliths started to dominate the web the community kind of crumbled. They tried to migrate the forum to a facebook group but it didn't work out and people gradually drifter away.

Most of the users were in the 20 to 30 range, there was one guy that was close to 40 and for whatever reason he singled me out would constantly grief me on the forum and in voice chat in games. Any time we were on the same team or in lobby he would say I'm shit, or had a laggy connection and I would calling him a cunt faggot and we would get on with the game. I imagine these days we would both be banned for toxic behavior.

Also remember getting a slap on the wrist from one of the jannies for posting some cartoons I found online. They were WWII propaganda and I didn't realise they were probably pretty fucking offensive and racist to most viewers.

 

[Tito from Rocket Power]

Was 8chan small? I miss 8ch.

 

[Sage In All Fields]

Was 8chan small? I miss 8ch.

8chan in general wasn't especially small but some of the boards were. /b2/ towards the end of 8chan was wild, we all sort of knew it was the end.

 

[Coleslaw]

Was 8chan small? I miss 8ch.

No it was pretty big. I was on /b/ in 2015-16 and I witnessed the Trump campaign. Damn, I miss feeling part of something.

 

[CobraCommander]

back in 2015 i was part of a forum and server called moon central that was about moonman and i met a lot of weird people
a newfag woman came in and i bullied her all the time and she had a lot of tranny friends
she got married to a guy in the server called discordian she already had kids tho
civil war happened in the server and forums over the production of moonman songs
turns out her kids were half asian and this discordian guy was raising her children

the end

We're still going strong on Telegram, Discord just went full kike.https://t.me/MoonProductionsChat Discordian is still up to his old tricks though.

 

[ditto]

Strangest community I've been part of was the comment section of the abandoned Linux Hater's Blog that was hosted on Blogger, circa 2010. The blog had been abandoned by the original author but comments kept piling up like one huge continuous conversation about pretty much anything, complete with gimmick posters and one called Jerkface who went on to write his own spinoff.

 

[DNA_JACKED]

When I was younger, before we had home internet. I remember going to our local library to play Pokemon Crater with some other kids from school. It was a blast, as someone who couldnt afford the actual games. The forums captured many hours of my childhood and the bragging over special shinies was endless.

Sadly the forums were shut down in version 4, and my interest int he game began to fade. Was still pretty broken up over the game being shut down completely a few years later, sadly nobody seemed to have a full backup of the experience.

I was also a regular player of Star wars: Empire at war when I was in middle school. The online community only had a handful of people still playing at the time. Myself, a guy on the west coast, one from france, one from russia, one from japan, and one from south africa. We played on the weekends pretty regularly for about a year before an unfortunate update nuked the official servers.

I was also on overclock.net, hardOCP, and toms hardware in the late 2000s/early2010s. I lost my OC.net account in 2014, and watching that site die has been a shame. It used to regularly see 200+ post threads on every hardware topic, but now rarely sees over 10, usually from the same handful of people. The knowledgeable people left as the site rotted with ancient forum software and owners none too interested in fixing problems. Toms Hardware became a total joke, and hardOCP fell off a cliff once the main review site was nuked. Now the tech discussion is fractured among smaller sites with the same rookies asking the same questions month after month.

 

[The Lawgiver]

Was it digibutter.nerr?

God that fucking takes me back. I don't remember that game on there, but I remember that as a mario fan forum. I used to be a really active member there, as well as some of the offshoot forums people made back in the day, but considering how long ago it was you'd probably not even be able to tell. So much shit is lost from that timeframe of the internet around the mid-late 2000s and It's a shame cause some of my early actual internet activity memories are just fucking gone and memory holed. Last time I told someone about the place and they checked in on it the site had become a kotaku mirror or something stupid like that, but there was a chat sidebar thing where old members were still talking with each other and it was so fucking wild to me.

I've told some friends about a story from that place a few times thats just stuck with me for years. Said story is about a troll calling himself "lord bowser" that was pretty much a guy that'd leave near perfect nintendo bowser dialogue level rants in threads to the ire of the fucking staff. He was banned a multitude of times but kept coming back, and ended up spawning a few shittier copycats that used their own original the character instead. I can't remember if the mods eventually just gave up or something but I remember the bans became a running joke of sorts for a while. He made his own forum thing at one point as a "protest" against the admins of the main site or something funny like that. I don't think he did the troll gimmick on his own forum but then again i can't clearly remember all of this shit from over a decade ago. I do remember him being a pretty chill guy when he wasn't doing his schtick, though. Kinda wonder what he's up to now. Hopefully Nintendo hired that man, though I doubt they did.

Found out last year or so that the old kinda shitty wikia some users of digibutter made was still up and unaltered. The weird fucking intentional "FREE FLASH DOWNLOAD UPDATE FLASH NOW!" scam site links some chucklefucks somehow hid in the basic site buttons were still there too, and worked somehow. The links The pop under showed up even on a modern computer with "stronger" security. I kinda wish I still had some of the old files and screenshots from way back in those days just so I could show people some of the weird shit that went down I still remember after all this time. The moon shit I've seen on kiwifarms a few times also happened over there a few times. I think I got a little majora's mask sticker on my profile back then for being online during it or something.

I could go on rambling somewhat incoherently about that old place's antics but I really don't want this word heap to pile on any further. I'm completely fucking out of it. It's late but my brain just keeps chugging along despite needing fucking sleep. If you know anything or got any stories about the happenings there feel free to share em. I got weird stories from other places, but once again tired body + active brain is not a good combo for getting shit across coherently.

 

[Stasi]

I don't know if this will ring a bell for anyone but way back (like 2006 or 07) I remember a long forum thread making the rounds on various internet communities.

I think this was on a bodybuilding forum (possibly bodybuilding.com). Some Jersey guido posted a picture of him and some buddies in a club complete with fake tan, fish lips, spiked hair and kangol headband and inadvertently unleashed absolute hell. He was subject to some of the most savage flaming I have ever seen with memes, photoshops and pasta being unleashed in epic proportions. It escalated so quickly that links to the thread were being shared on other forums. I remember lurking the thread and it was well into the hundreds of pages, possibly thousands by the end. OP posting in the thread trying to own the haters really didn't help and I remember seeing memes of the picture popping up in other places around that time. An early example of someone getting so savagely owned they became a meme.

Memory of it is a bit sketchy but I swear this was real and I didn't make it up in my head.

 

[Not Really Here]

I started using the Internet for what god intended in the late '90's. Downloading porn.
Then in the early 2000's I found a bussy hack that involved listening to women, downloading chick music they liked and making mix CD's. The hack? Same age girls were mostly into the same shit so I burned a few of the same mix and enjoyed squeals of 'you so get me' then sex.

Years later I found my first forum, I wasn't interested in most of it but people posted news stories and others argued over them in interesting and dumb ways. Then, all of a sudden I refreshed my open tabs and there was nothing. For some reason the faggots at Google downrank sites for copying shit rather than just returning the best results so the site owner put all the shit I was interested in behind a membership wall.

And that's how after my 30th birthday and before my 45th birthday I was forced to join my first forum.
And now I have an outlet for calling people nigger.