Came here from the column and the books, of which I’m in one.
No. I’d read a couple of the books, but I came here from a link on some evolution topic or other, I think.
I first ran across the column in a (long-defunct) alt weekly in Atlanta in the mid-80s. That’s right, folks, the mid-80s. Got the first few books as they came out. Lost track of the column as no papers carried it where I lived. Reconnected with the column through the wonder of the WWW. Lurked on the board a long time before joining. Still a semi-lurker.
Nope. I came to the Straight Dope website through the TV SHOW. Yes, there was a brief flirtation with cable video in the late 90’s by the Straight Dope, hosted by some bald guy. I then found the SDMB through a link on the Straight Dope website.
I think I went from alt.folklore.urban to alt.fan.cecil-adams and/or the Straight Dope columns on this web site. Then years later, I created an account to make a comment of some kind on the message board.
Same here.
A quick check reveals that my last (only?) post on alt.fan.cecil-adams was in Feb 2000. So apparently I had nothing to say for 9 years. 
I found the old AOL boards back in the day (96 or 97ish?) when AOL posted Cecil’s column about the existence of Dracula on their front page. Mostly lurked the incarnations of the SDMB even since – only started posting in the past year, really.
I read the column first. I don’t know how I came across the forums. It was either through clicking around on the SD web site or from an independent web search. I’m thinking the second may be more likely.
I found the online column on somebody’s page of interesting links (back when such a thing warranted an entire page or an entire website rather than a sidebar on a blog) and started following the column a bit more than a decade ago. A short time later, I decided to look into this Threadspotting thing, and I’ve been lurking ever since.
No doubt you signed up just before the stroke of midnight so you could post in a primitive version of the Celebrity Death Pool.
Of all the places, I read a quick article in a MacWorld magazine that mentioned cool and interesting websites. The blurb piqued my interest, and here I am… 10 years later…
I had never heard of The Straight Dope or Cecil until about six months ago. :hangs head in shame: I stumbled onto this place when I was monitoring a customer’s account for possible fraud and a strange charge hit her account. I Googled the name and the first hit was a thread on this website. I read the thread, then kept reading… and kept reading… and kept reading. (The charge was legit, BTW) I lurked here for a while then decided to join up. Sometimes reading here is what gets me through a day at work.
So you think you might have been monitoring a Doper? Cool!
Read a Reader’s Digest condensation of the Scientific America article on Cecil. I saved it and bought the first book, then came here when I got Interent access.
I still have the article stored in a first edition of the first book I bought used.
I’d not heard of the SD before I came here. Another poster on here mentioned it on another forum I frequent so I thought I would check it out.
Sort of. I’ve never read the books, but I came to the site following a link to a Spotted thread, started poking around the Answers list, and there was one on deaf people that I found very interesting and forwarded to a friend who’d recently mentioned a deaf-from-birth nephew. This is the answer, which she told me she’d found very informative as it explained a lot of the difficulties her nephew experienced.
After reading the whole archive, I jumped to the boards.
Nope, I had never heard of the column/book before joining here.
I was actually searching for another board that I had come across years before (and was trying to find again). It had been a movie forum, so I googled something like “movies” and “forums”.
I found this place through the results and originally thought that this was the place I was looking for. It wasn’t, but by the time I figured it out, I had already read a ton of threads here and enjoyed them.
Yes. There are three columns I would read religiously in the Chicago Reader and before I read anything else: The Straight Dope, Savage Love, and News of the Weird. Apparently, judging by my join date, it wasn’t until 2000 I discovered there was a message board connected to the Straight Dope.
The column was in my college newspaper, and one day, not long after I got on the web for the first time there was a link to the site. This would have been between 1992 and 1998, so I guess these boards weren’t here then, but I regularly visited the site. At some point after that I must have clicked on the link to the boards, and I lurked for a few years before I ever signed up to post.