{thows down gauntlet}
You have obviously never read any of MY posting history! I challenge you to out-dumb me
No wait…dammit!
On a sorta more serious note, I was bored one day and searched “trivia website” and that is how I found the dope column which, in turn lead me here
That’s funny — I remember, circa 2000, the SD column web page would warn users about to use their search routine that “Alta Vista it ain’t.” 
(Meaning, “don’t expect complete results — this isn’t some awesome, high-powered search engine like Alta Vista.”)
1999, 18 years old. I had my first post-high-school job, and full, unfettered access to the internet for the first time. I discovered the Straight Dope website, and loved the content there. With the hokey search functions of the site at the time, I could just search for the letter ‘a’ and get a list of every article on the site, which I read voraciously in any downtime at the office. After I seemed to be out of reading material, I stumbled on the link to the message board, and I’ve been here ever since.
According to my profile, I didn’t actually register until 2011. I know I had one other account that I had merged into this one; I don’t know if it keeps the oldest join date or just the date of the account that was the target of the merge. Regardless, I have a tendency to not say a lot, so it wouldn’t surprise me if I lurked for over a decade.
You are correct!
Back in either 1999 or 2000 I was part of a mailing list, (anyone remember those?), devoted to a TV show that was current at the time. On this mailing list a discussion broke out concerning an older TV show called HR Pufnstuf. A link was posted to the mailing list that led to one of Cecil’s old columns. After reading the column I started looking around at some of the other columns and I realized just how wide-ranging the straight dope was in column form.
After reading a bunch of the columns I of course found this board. And I was surprised by how much smarter and sharper the discussions were here than pretty much anywhere else I had seen online at the time. The discussions here tend to reflect Cecil’s old columns, both in tone and substance.
In January of 2001 I officially registered. I had been reading the board for a good year or a year and a half before that. I don’t know at the time that I had any intention of ever posting, but I liked this place and I liked the people here, and I wanted to feel like I belonged in some way even if I wasn’t actively participating at the time.
In addition, and I touched on this before in other threads, 9/11 is what really made me a fan of the dope. At the tender age of 19, 9/11 happened and it threw me in multiple ways. It was definitely a inflection point in my life. Nothing about it made sense to me. Reading this board made a whole lot of things make sense that previously didn’t. And not just 9/11. Current events, history, science, the news, math, theology and religion. I read everything and anything that I could for a very long time. A lot of the long time posters here don’t know this, but a lot of you had a hand in raising me to be who I am today. Maybe not physically but definitely intellectually and mentally. You all have definitely made me smarter than I would have been otherwise. Especially in today’s environment, the most important thing that I have taken away from this board is learning how to spot gaslighting, lies, and bullshit. I have gleaned a ton of factual knowledge from this place, but the most important thing is you all taught me how to think. And I will be forever grateful for that.
25 years later the rest is history.
(And if anyone feels the need to go back and look at my earliest posts, please don’t. I am not proud of my earliest posting history, but people can change a lot in 20 years. And that is not who I am anymore.)
Seconded!
In the late 1980s I lived just north of Chicago, and would peruse a free alternative newspaper called the Chicago Reader. The paper carried The Straight Dope column. A few years later I had moved to another part of the country, but found the column online and thus the message board.
ETA: I just checked and apparently they still distribute a print version of the Reader, which suprises me a bit.
In the mid-late 1980s we took a trip to Paris and stayed with a friend in their apartment. He had just been on vacation in the US, had found the books and bought them. Being the perfect house guest, I read all of them during the stay.
Sometime in the 2000’s, I was idly googling, and was moved to wonder if there was any Straight Dope stuff on line. Found the columns, read them all, probably several times each. Looking for more of the same, I noticed the message board, and basically - deliberately - lurked until I started retiring (being self employed is very time consuming, and I had enough sense to limit myself to lurking).
Signed up as soon as I knew I had the time…
j
Somebody sent me a link to this post:
The column was in DC’s The City Paper and I read it religiously. I emailed Cecil to ask a question, and while he declined to answer my question, he suggested I ask it here and I did. That thread dropped like a stone and for over two decades, I’ve been looking for redemption.
This.
“Way back when,” for me was the mid 80s.
I was looking for an intelligent message board, so I Googled, “Smartest message board on the internet?”
This was the first hit. I checked it out and never left.
In 2002 or so I was in a call centre and, while browsing the web between calls, found a website listing ways to kill time at work. SDMB was one of the links and the only one that really stuck. I’ve been wasting time here since.
I’d been a serious fan of the column and books since the 80s. When the World Wide Web was becoming a thing, there was a period when I would randomly search for interesting things on Altavista just to see if they had a webpage. (Weird, heady days.) In this way I hit on the AOL boards long about 1999, but didn’t sign up until a few years later.
A little of both for me.
I read the column in the local alt weekly. I was especially impressed with the one where Cecil goes over what, physically, is the flame in a fire. This started circa 2000.
A couple years later, a web search for a random question turned up a thread on the boards, which I recognized WRT the column.
I lurked for a while and appreciated the nature of the discourse and discussion. The community recognized the difference between opinion, logical argument, facts, and citations (which were provided in advance/on request).
Hard to resist for somebody who likes to think.
I found out about The Straight Dope from Honolulu Weekly, a freebie newsletter my college distributed. Although I want to very, very strongly stress again that I do not follow any cults of personality and do not, under any circumstances, fall down into slavering worship over an author whose entire schtick is being completely anonymous and expecting you to fall down into slavering worship of him because of that (plus he completely messed up the Monty Hall goats problem, but I realize that one’s a nuclear blast crater at this point), the style was interesting and it covered a variety of topics I’d never seen discussed before. Then I found out that it was on the Internet, then I found out there were message boards, then I found out they had intelligent discussions and, more importantly, threw out the bums, and the rest was history.
It’s pretty amazing how I haven’t posted to any other message board in ages, and most of them don’t even exist anymore. I still remember having heated arguments about Beatmania IIDX, of all the silly things.