Post 32.
Found it after watching the Straight Dope on A&E. I lurked for a while before registering in 1999.
I’ve been reading the board daily since then, even if my post count doesn’t seem like it…
Stumbleupon led me to The Horror of Blimps.
The column used to show up linked to the start screen at AOL. I lurked until college though, I think.
I used to read Neil Gaiman’s blog and he mentioned The Straight Dope once or twice as a way to get answers to odd questions. I actually avoided the forums for a long time, just because I had never liked any other forums, and stuck to the Cecil/Staff Report areas of the site.
Then I had a question and sent it in to Cecil. I got an email back saying that the odds were that Cecil wouldn’t answer, but there was this forum where a lot of other people might. So I checked it out.
It’s been awhile since then.
That is basically exactly what happened to me. A mate said I should have a look at the SD main page as a way to waste some time during boring night shifts. Then I mailed a question in and got the same reply as you and did the same thing 
You’re welcome.
me too
I saved a Reader’s Digest from the 1980’s that had an article about The Straight Dope. I later bought the first book, and when the Internet came out, I found this place.
I was a big Usenet reader, but getting reliable newsfeeds was getting tougher and tougher, and I was being overwhelmed by the volume. Someone in talk.origins said that there was a good evolution discussion going on here, so I came to visit and I stayed.
Let’s see 21k posts, average of 3 minutes a post - shudder - and that doesn’t even count reading the stuff.
I got one of the books at some point in the '90s. I found the boards on the information super highway during a random “I wonder?” moment and joined up a year or two after that. Been pretty much lurking ever since.
Reaction #1: <sigh> AltaVista … that takes me back, man. The nostaligia! sniff!
Reaction #2: If that was unintentional, then “google” as a verb has officially become removed from its initial origins. (Much as I am thrilled to find that “santorum” seems to have done the same.)
If it was intentional, then … bravo! 
I was researching some unvarifiable fact for an online conversation I was having and one of the references suggested Cecil’s column.
My brother told me about it. What a guy. Now I never see him here anymore.
I had read some of the books, but got to the message board from a search engine IIRC. I was searching for dowsing and found Cecil’s article on it.
Totally by accident. I was actually looking for another board that I had been at months before. I really enjoyed reading it and tried to find it again. It was a TV board (about TV shows), actually, and the set up was the same as it is here (white background, etc).
So I googled around a bit and thought that this was the TV site. Took me a day to figure out it wasn’t…but I had already registered so I decided to stick around and read a few topics. I liked the topics I read and decided to stay.
Incidentally, I finally did find the TV show forum I was looking for (fanforum dot com) a bit later…but by that time I was already a hooked doper.
Bored.com, while working overnights for these people.
I’m another poster who got here via the books.
I read Cecil’s first book (The Straight Dope) in 1987 or so. I picked up the follow-up books as they were published over the next few years, and did a web search at some point in 2000 to see if I’d missed any of them. The search led me to Cecil’s columns on this website, and from there to the SDMB.
Someone sent me a link to “What if LotR was written by someone else?” and it went on from there.
Yet another who found it through the books. That’s why I checked both the first and last option on the poll. 