I had been lurking since 2000 or so, and what finally drove me to sign up was the introduction of pay-to-post and the chance to get the half-price subscription for life.
If you’re not prolific enough to show up in that list, one way to find your old member # is to go to archive.org’s cache of the old site and find a thread you posted in. Once you’ve found one of those, then you can hover over your name and your old user ID will show up in that URL, the same as explained in the linked thread.
I just did that, and my number is 40147, so I was late to the party.
ETA: heh, and if you go to that page now, it correctly seems to translate the user ID, but redirects you to a 404 page.
Glad to be of service (and wow, your ID is only a bit older than mine). Here’s a link to the most recent cache of the old software I can easily find, BTW:
I’m a '99’er. Back when the board was yellow. I actually registered in September 1999, but had to re-do it in October due to newbie-reasons (my username was all caps, which I did not realize was a faux pas).
I’m still here. Probably one of the most conservative posters still logging in, but a Trump-hater, so hardly leaves me any room to discuss anything other than the occasional sports or movie post. Oh well.
I feel like Isaac Asimov. He came to America from Russia when he about three. Somehow his birth date went missing, so he just celebrated January 2, 1920 as his birthday. He probably was a couple of months older.
Same here. My official date is early 2002, but I actually joined during the Winter of Missed Content. I’ve been here several months longer than 22 years, but my true date along with all my early posts are dust.
Charter Member once the Board went pay. Actually joined back in the early, early days ((honestly don’t remember when) - it had to have been pre-1997 based on the fact that I was still using CompuServe to access the Internet at my now 3-back employer. Rejoined under a new username/e-mail in '99 so I consider myself an honorary '99er. I think I actually e-mailed Tuba about it because I was worried about being labeled a sock and got told “no sweat”.
Proud Charter Member from the beginning. At the time I was a number of other message boards, and it always struck me how much more polite, intelligent, conscientious, and well-organized this was than any other. I couldn’t subscribe fast enough.
For whatever reason my subscription lapsed without my realizing it (I think more than once), so when I signed back on I was just an ordinary Member.