# Been foruming long, yes? (1 Viewer)



## caelum (Sep 4, 2010)

FIIIIIIGAROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoO


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## Like a Fox (Sep 4, 2010)

Well I joined a week after my 23rd birthday, and am now nearly 24 and a half.
This was my first forum, and remains mostly my only forum.

I have a lap band (and my real name is Kathleen) so I joined a lap band forum and made my handle 'Fatleen'.
I couldn't take that place seriously though. Obviously.

I guess my post count is a bit excessive given my short tenure here. But... whatever. Haha


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## caelum (Sep 4, 2010)

FIIIIIIGAROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoO


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## Eluixa (Sep 4, 2010)

I've been on forums for coming up on six years, or somewhere around there. First was for learning to ebay. Eventually it was more about living and family, and then some friends broke off, made a new forum, and I eventually followed. Later broke with the first as most I talked to had joined the second. 
Joined one called Thoughts for a while but found them less openminded than I'd expected from the name. A couple other forums did not last a month, one was for photography. 
Came here just a little over 1 1/2 years ago, about six months after I began writing. 
Recently joined another that deals with health and well being, so I have three now I visit regularly. Just a little addicted, lol.


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## T.G. Harrison (Sep 4, 2010)

I've been on forums since I was, maybe... twelve? That sounds about right. My first forum was that of Artix Entertainment, whose OOC board I practically lived in long after I grew out of their games. Then I kinda' branched out into various free boards made by friends from OOC, and then they all became inactive and disappeared. It happens. 
As sad as it sounds, some of the happiest moments of my life have been on forums. ^.^

That said, the postcount has never been my friend. I don't post in threads I'm not interested in, and my spectrum of interesting things is becoming narrower and narrower.


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## The Backward OX (Sep 4, 2010)

caelum said:


> there are people who make few-and-long posts that spend more time here than people who make many-and-short posts (ahem, the bovine one).


 
Hey,


, in part, it's an age-related thing. Young people, and women, have a need to say more, in order to prove they exist. Old men don't need to prove anything and so don't need to say as much.


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## Baron (Sep 4, 2010)

The Backward OX said:


> Hey,
> 
> 
> , in part, it's an age-related thing. Young people, and women, have a need to say more, in order to prove they exist. Old men don't need to prove anything and so don't need to say as much.



Examples of succinct, well thought out, Edna posts:



The Backward OX said:


> ...





The Backward OX said:


> Phooey.





The Backward OX said:


> Hmmm...





The Backward OX said:


> bleep


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 4, 2010)

I have been on forum since my join date here. I joined Writing Discussions and posted there a few times after Selorian started it, but never any others, I don't have that sort of time. Otherwise I use the internet mainly for practical reasons, the last thing was registering for Glastonbury, before that finding a new knob for the cooker.


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## qwertyman (Sep 4, 2010)

I joined a writing group and after a few sessions listening to, 'I liked the bit where you wrote...' and 'It's your turn to bring the biscuits.' I asked a question about a problem I was having at the time about a narrator with a personality... it was as though I'd thrown a mutilated cat on the table.

Nice people, probably too nice. I googled 'Writing Forums' just in time to catch Hodge* in full uncompromising flow.

*Hodge lived in Alaska...'nough said.


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## Baron (Sep 4, 2010)

qwertyman said:


> *Hodge lived in Alaska...'nough said.



He still does.  Don't want a tense error creating rumours.


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## Leyline (Sep 4, 2010)

22 years, since the days of FIDOnet and bulletin board systems.


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## RoundEye (Sep 4, 2010)

With the exception of Leyline ya’ll are making me feel old, in computer terms.  I’ve been a member of SpeedGuide going on eleven years now.  It’s a computer and cable internet based forum and I still regularly post (almost 17,000) there under the same screen name. Over time I have made friends with people, met quite a few, talk to some on the phone on a regular basis.  This is the only writing based forum I belong to. 

I didn’t think it could happen but I have made some friends through text.


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## The Backward OX (Sep 4, 2010)

*Warning - contains crude language*



qwertyman said:


> I joined a writing group and after a few sessions listening to, 'I liked the bit where you wrote...' and 'It's your turn to bring the biscuits.' I asked a question about a problem I was having at the time about a narrator with a personality... it was as though I'd thrown a mutilated cat on the table.
> 
> Nice people, probably too nice. I googled 'Writing Forums' just in time to catch Hodge* in full uncompromising flow.
> 
> *Hodge lived in Alaska...'nough said.


The inference being that real writers are by nature a pack of arseholes?


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## caelum (Sep 5, 2010)

FIIIIIIGAROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoO


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## caelum (Sep 5, 2010)

FIIIIIIGAROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoO


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## qwertyman (Sep 5, 2010)

The Backward OX said:


> The inference being that real writers are by nature a pack of arseholes?


 
No, just too nice to offer useful advice, in a word, altruists.


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## The Backward OX (Sep 5, 2010)

qwertyman said:


> No, just too nice to offer useful advice, in a word, altruists.


 
Methinks you're confusing the village glee club, sorry, writing group, with WF.


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## Bruno Spatola (Sep 5, 2010)

Useful advice is useful advice, whether it's given nicely or otherwise, but I guess you see it differently.

Arsehole or altruist? I think I know which I prefer to be 

I've only been using forums for the last year, mainly video game related but they don't have much of a community vibe in my opinion. These particular forums are definitely more rewarding, for me any way.


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## JosephB (Sep 5, 2010)

I've been on forums 7 or 8 years. Mostly to do with work. I'm a graphic designer and creative director, but since I focus on web projects, I'm a member of various technical forums. I don't do programming, but I often need technical advice. They've been a godsend. It's amazing to me how helpful people are even knowing that I can't really reciprocate. 

I'm also a member of a guitar forum and my wife and I are both members of a couple of home schooling forums. 

I've also joined or have at least lurked in many forums to do research for short stories and my novel. Everything from a nursing (RN) to car restoration. Forums are a good source for firsthand knowledge and a great way to get details about things that you just can't get anywhere else.


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## copperflyingace (Sep 5, 2010)

I started seriously foruming about two years ago. I had joined a couple of extremely specific forums when I was 12 or so, but left due to boredom. When I finally got back into it, I joined a forum mostly populated by active duty and retired US Air Force personnel cause my life goal (one of them, at least) is to fly for the Air Force. I still post there pretty frequently, but I'm sort of the permanent FNG there because of my age and status as a CAP cadet. I post on a video game forum from time to time, but most of the people on there are pretentious little pricks so I've come to avoid that place.


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## garza (Sep 5, 2010)

Leyline - FIDOnet came along some years later, as I recall. 

On the early bulletin boards almost all the talk was about building and programming computers. I started late 1977 with an S-100 built in the card cage of a lightning devasted almost new Harris System 90 that had been written off by the insurance company. The double-deep cage was empty when I got it, but all the boards were wasted anyway from a spike on the ps rails. I rebuilt the power supply and built up boards with ideas from various magazines and books using the then-new Intel 8086 cpu and the Hayes 80103 modem. I/O was provided by a Texas Instruments Silent 700, which combined keyboard, printer, and tape punch in one unit. 

Those late '70s, early '80s proto-forums were a lot of fun. We swapped a lot of software, sending page after page of 8086 and Z-80 assembly code. We didn't buy software because there wasn't much to buy, and there was a certain pride attached, and bragging rights earned, when you could distribute a utility programme you'd written yourself.

The youngsters here missed all that. And looking back 20 years and more, I have to say, they didn't miss much. Today's Internet and today's computers are the elements of a world we only dreamed about in the '70s and early '80s. We all ought to appreciate today's forums with their instant access and ease of use.

And we should also appreciate the incredibly high level of intellectual conversation from learnéd and adept ladies and gentlemen from all over the world including Downunderland.


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## The Backward OX (Sep 5, 2010)

garza - I’m not exactly sure of how to take that.

_What I am sure of_ is that in regular English English we don’t need an acute over the second e in learned to indicate how the word is pronounced. That knowledge comes from usage.

In fact, the acute does nothing for the pronunciation anyway, so why did you bother?

If you wish to differentiate from 'He learned his ABC', you should in fact be saying 'He learnt his ABC'.

*learn·ed* [ lúrnəd ]​ 

adjective ​ 


*Definition:*​ 


*1. highly educated: *well educated and very knowledgeable​ 

_a learned professor_​


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## JosephB (Sep 5, 2010)

garza said:


> Leyline - FIDOnet came along some years later, as I recall.
> 
> On the early bulletin boards almost all the talk was about building and programming computers. I started late 1977 with an S-100 built in the card cage of a lightning devasted almost new Harris System 90 that had been written off by the insurance company. The double-deep cage was empty when I got it, but all the boards were wasted anyway from a spike on the ps rails. I rebuilt the power supply and built up boards with ideas from various magazines and books using the then-new Intel 8086 cpu and the Hayes 80103 modem. I/O was provided by a Texas Instruments Silent 700, which combined keyboard, printer, and tape punch in one unit.
> 
> ...


 
When I was a young'n, we'd duct tape a TV to a typewriter and use an old electric razor for a mouse. It wasn't much -- but we made do.


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## garza (Sep 5, 2010)

Ox - If you teach ESL classes, you learn to deviate in certain ways from what is standard in order to get a point across. Words that are spelt the same but have different meanings and oftentimes different pronunciations can really confuse a person whose first language is one of great regularity, such as Spanish. 

Using accent marks can help the student recognise the difference in meaning and and pronunciation in different contexts. Even people who claim English as a first language, often in error but it can be dangerous to point that out, have difficulty properly understanding and pronouncing something like, 'The farmers learned much at the workshop which was led by a learned agronomist.' An accent mark can indicate a difference between the two related words. 

Many years ago I acquired the habit of writing the adjective 'learnéd' with the accent. Sorry it bothers you.

JosephB - Did you give your system a model number? The technology you describe wasn't far behind what we were using in the late '70s.

I just realised, late '70s, early '80s is not 20, but 30 years ago.


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## The Backward OX (Sep 5, 2010)

garza - Yeah, you're probably right, in the context of ESL. My world view is narrower. Sorry.


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## garza (Sep 5, 2010)

English is a wonderful language once you have proper control of it, but it can be terribly difficult to learn for people who've grown up speaking a language structured differently, and that includes almost all other languages.


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## The Backward OX (Sep 6, 2010)

'Do you speak Esperanto?'
'Like a native.'


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## qwertyman (Sep 6, 2010)

Bruno Spatola said:


> Useful advice is useful advice, whether it's given nicely or otherwise, but I guess you see it differently.
> 
> Arsehole or altruist? I think I know which I prefer to be


 
Dear me 

.

If someone only tells you what they think you want to hear, it's not likely to be useful.


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## garza (Sep 6, 2010)

Ox - You've just proven that dialogue by itself can tell a story, and do it with few words.


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## Kat (Sep 7, 2010)

Been visiting forums about 14 years or so, way back when they were bulletin boards and all we had was dial up. 

Been here since 2004. Not constantly though, off and on.


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## garza (Sep 7, 2010)

14 years takes us back to '96. We were well beyond bulletin boards by then, though they were still around, and we were still using dial-up. Bulletin boards were at their peak in the late '70s and early '80s. I started taking part in bbs activity in 1977.


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## chimchimski (Sep 7, 2010)

My forum scene experience is only a couple of years old.  Well, since my joining here.  This was my first...I am currently on a few other sites, another writing site ( I only go there to check friend messages ), and an art site where I share my photography, I frequent that one quite a bit.  Sadly, I am not much of a computer fanatic...:-(


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## Kat (Sep 7, 2010)

garza said:


> 14 years takes us back to '96. We were well beyond bulletin boards by then, though they were still around, and we were still using dial-up. Bulletin boards were at their peak in the late '70s and early '80s. I started taking part in bbs activity in 1977.


 
I started chatting on a local bulletin board. That was my first forum. Dial-up was so incredibly slow way out in BFE that attempting to visit much of anything was a waste of time. I'm sure that there was much more available, just not to me.


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## garza (Sep 7, 2010)

Even in the late '70s there was a great deal available, but you are right about dial-up being slow. It had to do with the bandwidth of ordinary telephone lines in those days. My modem ran at 300 baud, if the line was good, but even at that speed you could transfer a lot of text with a little patience, and text is all there was. I didn't have a video display until 1979 when I bought my first factory-built computer, a TRS-80 with four k of ram and a cassette recorder for data storage.


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## alanmt (Sep 7, 2010)

August 2, 2005, I joined The Superficial forum, which has since been closed.  The Superficial is a hollywood gossip site.  Nicco and I quit that forum and came here.

I am a member here and of a small lunch forum of friends.


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