Way back when, I was a mod at Triviana on AOL. The Dope would come up in conversation, so I went over and lurked. When the Dope moved to the Web I signed up. As you can see, I still mainly lurk now, too.
I found the link for the Straight Dope on bored.com, then spent hours browsing Cecil’s archives. For years, I visited straightdope.com every day to read the column.
About two years ago, I noticed the “message board” button for the first time, and found another source of interesting debate and information. I lurked almost daily until finally joining a few weeks ago.
I saw the SDMB mentioned on the CBC boards a few years back. Came over to check it out and was immediately hooked.
Haphazardly I came accross one of Cecil’s brilliantly humorous answers. Got hooked. :mad:
You know Ray Owens? He’s the guy that’s responsible for the emailing. He runs a site called www.jokeaday.com and used to link to tha Dope. (Ray may have studied snarkiness from the Master.) I came once or twice, then discovered the archives. I worked my way through most of those, then sort of stuck around for a while reading the new columns.
I never bothered with the MB until I read the threadspotting about the infamous Marianas Trench visit. I was hooked.
(You may have heard that, although man has been to the surface of the moon 6 times, we have only been to the bottom of the Marianas Trench once, in the 1960’s, and only for about 20 minutes…)
I couldn’t believe that there was this place where people were allowed, nay, required even, to have as bad a sense of humor as I do. This place even encourages (somewhat / sometimes) intelligent debate and exchange of ideas. And to think, if I hadn’t read that thread, I would have never fathomed that such a place would exist; I would have never plumbed its depths to …
…
… damn; I was going for something thick and lost it. Nevermind. 
I will say it load and proud: I need my DOPE!