Followed a link from: hemlock, who is very humourous - even if you don’t live in Hong Kong.
I got here via a link in the online edition of a newspaper, about the best humor sites on the net!! The main pagaes of the site didn’t strike me as funny, but the boards were a different matter.
I googled Jesus H Christ to find out where the H comes from as I have a friend who insists it is because his last name happens to begin with H and I needed some more ammunition. Of course Cecil’s answer for the The Straight Dope came up.
Then totally unrelated a week or so later my daughter told me about the site and started sharing some of the threads with me and in general, how the boards worked and how much she enjoyed the people here. She came over one day and pulled up a thread on my computer that she thought I would like. After she left I read that thread and lurked for about 30 minutes before getting out my credit card to join.
Bricker, manhattan, and possibly some other dopers invaded a game website (Pyroto Mountain, now defunct) where I was a player. SD became more interesting.
Googled it while doing some genealogy research.
The child was “asking Jeeves*” for some help with some homework (can’t remember what the hell it was about now). He was reading out the various search results. “Straightdope” came up. Leave that one for now, I told him. I checked it when he had finished and have been addicted ever since.
That was early 2001, I was happy with just reading for a while. Can anyone tell me when the addiction ends?
*I had never even heard of google till SDMB. Damn you all 
In the 80s while attending the University of Maryland I used to read the column every week. Later after a got online it wasa one of the first things I looked for. For years I stayed pretty much with the columns. Its only been the last couple of years that I have been on the message boards.
Well, I had read one of Cecil’s books in a bookstore (as a youth, I didn’t buy books – there was no way I could afford all the books I wanted to read), and later I came across the SD on AOL and read a bunch of the columns. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago, though, that I was searching for the answer to a question (a word origin, possibly, for another favorite site) and came across the new Straight Dope Website. I rediscovered Cecil, joined imediately, and was posting replies in GQ that day.
Plain damn dumb luck.
IIRC, I followed a link from another post, probably in alt.Callahans.
I found the Straight Dope website by following a link from either Snopes or CSICOP. I read the column, then I read the archives, then I started reading the Staff Report archives; I rationed myself to two colums a day and when they were almost used up I saw the link for Threadspotting; I started lurking on the boards about January of this year, and when the pay to post plan became reality I joined up quick before the fee went up. Still mostly a lurker, though.
I was visiting a site I sometimes go to when bored - Cruel Site of the Day (www.cruel.com). There was a link there to an older thread here about pimple stories. Out of curiosity I checked it out and, while grossed out from the stories, I was intrigued to check out the rest of the SDMB. So I did, I thought it was great, and now here I am!
Damned, I caught myself lying again. Unintentionally of course. I didn’t use Google then. I used Webcrawler at that time (still do occasionally) I got Google from the folks here.
It was just prior to our winter of missed content. I had been lurking around for awhile and decided to get involved in a few threads. One was with a poster from HongKong IIRC and she kinda freaked when I said that GWB was on a quest. That he was going to sweep the middle east clean of terrorists in his religious zeal. He would “conquer” Afghanistan and then go into Iraq. She was like…yeah bullshit. Actually seemed shocked to think that Bush might have some kinda messiah complex. *footnote
Another thread was a debate with doper about Nietzche and his idealistic beliefs. I was referring to the fact that what he believed was not realistic. He was arguing that idealism is nothing like what Nietzche believed.
We never got that straight IIRC.
*It doesn’t matter because those threads got lost.