My life was deprived of the SDMB until something like the first quarter of this year.My best pal calm kiwi, on one of our regular chats told me to check this place out cause she was hooked to this for nearly a year.
When I came on first , all I did was check out the classic column archives, and after 2 months or so I got hooked on to the boards.Never looked back ever since.
Cant thank my pal enough.
I’m one of the old fossils who remembers the Straight Dope as a column in alternative newspapers. 
I used a dowsing rod.
I was idly googling to find out what is US equivalent of Digestive biscuits (mainly for a U.S.A friend in London). She wanted an equivalent to Graham crackers for some recipe or other.
Actualy I am not much the wiser on that one, but the quest did lead me to the Straight Dope, so it was extremely worthwhile. 
Creepy, ain’t it?
I think this is how it went for me- My mom got one of the books and the occasional newspaper column*, and then we started catching the TV show. I got around to searching for “straight dope” and found SD main site, and when they started up the message board, I joined, but didn’t post much. But then I got DSL, and the rest of my life was set.
I also remember the AOL site a bit, and I remember printing out columns from 1996-on from sd.com.
*-Can we work on getting the column in San Francisco? Is there a market that needs to know the caloric content of sperm half as much as we do?
Funny story. A few days ago I was checking emails (from somebody who apparently has never been here and replied back “the links won’t open” when I recommend this MB) when I got distracted on a MB for my beloved Giants (NFL, not MLB you wussies,) and then was googling something or other. At this point I had maybe 7 browsers open, so I decided to close the ones I wasn’t using. One of them somehow was open to Great Debates. I’d never even heard of this board, but was floored by the thread titles and brief board description, so I immediately posted a thread. (I’m just so daring.) That was 3 days ago, but I’m already hooked.
I just last night realized there were other boards besides Great Debates.
So now I’m a reformed Atheist…there must be a God, otherwise how did I find this board? hehheh
Incidentally, I found it telling that twice as many people viewing my Satan post as viewed my Heaven one. You heathens.
I can’t remember, but I vaguely remember it to be through bored.com. I lurked for a few weeks before I signed up, lurked some more and then posted my first message about seven months after that to a thread about SARS.
:smack: Boy, that sounds stupid.
A friend sent me the address to get to the MAIN PAGE and I looked at it and went thru the archives and was hooked. Not sure how I learned of the message boards…but it was certainly a long time after learning of the MAIN PAGE.
About four months ago, I was performing my favorite 'net activity, searching Google for answers to what some would consider trivial questions. This led me, of course, to the SD archive. After reading about half of it, I clicked on the message board link, and here I am.
My SO and I were arguing over the “water down the plughole - northern/southern hemisphere” question, and he sent me the link to Cecil’s column on the subject (OK… so SO was right 
)
After spending a few days reading through the archives I discovered the Message Boards a couple of months ago - and have been here ever since. Guess I owe SO a phone call by now … 
Julie
My wife loved the TV show on A&E (I think?) and when I finally got web access some time after that, I looked up the website. I didn’t even know what “message boards” meant exactly. I read the old columns and such and finally ventured in here. I lurked for a long time (years) before registering (which actually took two attempts and an administrator to complete!).
points at Medea’s Child and Luna Child It is entirely their fault that I am here. If you’re to blame anyone, blame them.
A doper friend sent an email with a link to a tread on grief. I lurked awhile before registering and posting.
Druidism.
No, really.
When I was an undergraduate back in the early 90s, I became extremely interested in the study of Irish Celtic history and culture. Part of this stemmed from an ongoing interest in my family’s Irish origins (I know, hardly unique), and from an interest in mythology.
At the time, I knew several individuals of a neo-pagan bent who claimed to practice a Celtic form of paganism or even “shamanism.” I was a bit skeptical of their claims, though. I have always been a stickler for historical accuracy, and many of their beliefs struck me as a syncretic blending of Wiccan practices and New Age ideas, with just a few Celtic gods’ names thrown into the mix.
Then, I came across a book about Druidism that seemed quite suited to me (I can’t recall the exact title, though I think I still have it somewhere…something like “the Secret Cauldron” or “The Sacred Cauldron”). The author insisted on a strictly historical understanding of Druidism as a part of Celtic culture. He was quite dismissive of New Age portrayals of the Druids as the builders of Stonehenge, the descendants of Atlantis, and similar nonsense.
So, this study of Druidism offered me a kind of perspective with which I sympathized: grounded in historical and literary scholarship, with a very healthy dose of skepticism about contemporary New Age versions of “Celtic” beliefs. The author had even founded a Druidic/Celtic organization that based its practices upon historical interpretations of Celtic religion (they’d hold observations for Celtic holidays like Samhain and Beltane and so forth). It seemed kind of neat, so I contacted his organization for information.
So what does this have to do with the Straight Dope?
Well, after several months had passed (by which time I’d almost forgotten that I had written them), I got a response. Included in a packet of information about the organization was a reading list of recommended books–many about Celtic history, but also several that had nothing to do with Irish history or Druidism, but were recommended mainly for honing one’s critical reading skills.
Included in that bibliography were the Straight Dope books.
I had never heard of the SD, but discovered my local library owned the books. While hunting down the sources on the list, I located the SD, and was so impressed with Cecil Adams that I went to the bookstore and bought his books for my personal collection.
Well, that particular Celtic group is defunct (in fact, I think it had pretty much dissolved not long after I received their packet), so that whole investigation into contemporary Druidism would be a moot point. While I’m still interested in Celtic history and mythology, I’ve given up on finding any revivalist Celtic organization that fits my own standards of scholarship and skepticism. Plus, I’ve come to consider the whole quest for authenticity a bit fruitless, particularly when dealing with a topic that we can only reconstruct from bits and pieces of folklore and some very biased Roman accounts (those Druids never kept written records of their own, damn them).
But, out of that experience, I was lead to the Straight Dope. And so it is, unlikely as it may seem, to Druidism that I owe my introduction to Cecil Adams, the World’s Most Intelligent Human Being.
As for the SDMB itself, I found it a few years ago via a link from the Snopes message board, I think. I recognized the name, of course, and started going through all the new questions before getting onto the message board (where I lurked for quite a while before registering).
I was a regular on the old DC Comics MB’s. Pretty frequently non-comics related discussions would erupt there and would be clamped down, so several regulars set up a private board for off-topic stuff. When it went down, one of the regulars there suggested to some of us that we come over here, although I think only watsonwil and I are the only ones who still post here.
–Cliffy
I also linked from Bored.com. I read the archives all the time, but didn’t bother to join until almost a year after I started reading the archives. If I only knew then what I know now…
I was having a conversation with a dental student about
“the 4 out of 5 dentists who recommend sugarless gum…” and what the 5th recommended.
SD archive had the answer, then I clicked on message boards and proceeded to piss people off.
I always liked Cecil’s column in the Reader and one day I too just thought, “Hey I wonder…”
I was reading a library site and someone had posted a link to a dope thread. It was by FENRIS and I laughed all the way through the thread and then went on to read others. I was hooked in about two hours.