I first read the Reader’s Digest article about Cecil many decades ago. I saved the issue until I found his first book, then clipped it and keep it in the book till this very day.
When we got the Internet at work, I checked out about a thousand theatre sites. Then clicked onto the best non-theatre one.
A friend recommended it.
Welcome 
I grew up reading Cecil’s column’s in the Washington, D.C. City Paper, and had copies of all his books. In 1996, I got my first (text-only) internet account, and noticed the alt.fan.cecil-adams USENET group. For a while Ed Zotti posted the weekly columns there. Then, over time, there were announcements first that a straightdope.com site had been set up for the column postings, and later that this web-based message board had been set up, replacing one which had been accessible only to AOL subscribers.
Annie-Xmas did say:
Cecil and Reader’s Digest? This I’ve got to see. Which issue???
www.walkaway.org 's forum mentioned www.control-z.com.
Control-z (freethinkers links) mentioned www.straightdope.com
Straightdope’s Home Page had,…ahem…
Threadspotting: our very own Ring cycle.
!!!
The books.
Another one from www.bored.com… Looks like there are three of us, so far. That’s surprising.
Well, my spousal unit, Echo23tc, used to blab on and on about the latest on the straight dope. It was sort of interesting but I’m pretty busy and almost never get online at home.
What finally made me get on and look though was the whole thread about the temperature under the pillow:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=151777
He obsessed about the answers and recommendations and of course the labwork for so long trying to figure out why the underside of the pillow feels colder than room temperature that I just had to check out this website.
I am now hooked and have even been to my first DopeFest (going to Helena Handbasket Dopefest!).
Welcome and enjoy!
I looked up Andygirl, which is my usual name on other messageboards, and saw that there’s someone on here with the same name. Interestingly enough, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her post anything except for the first day or so I was on here.
I also came from Bored.com.
[hijack]
Can no one else get on that anymore? I always get ‘Page cannot be displayed messages’. Has it been taken down?
[/hijack]
Another here from http://www.bored.com
I went looking for information about whether the tops from soda cans can be redeemed for time on kidney dialysis machines. I found the answer on the Straight Dope. Then I read all of the archived columns on the site. Eventually, I decided to check out the rest of the site and I started reading the forums.
Drachillix lured me into his bedroom for the first time, saying he’d show me something good. We hadn’t been dating long, it was the first time I’d been to his house and he wanted to show me the sigs of people who posted on SDMB.
I was seduced by the Dope!
I am a meta editor for the ODP, and someone there posted a link to a thread here. I’ve been reading here daily ever since. 
I looked under the potato and there it was.
I intercepted a printout from my boss, about laundry balls and do they really work, and after reading it on the way down to his office, got hooked. But, I only ventured to the front page at first, but became a lurker after reading Sycilla’s recount of the nazi groundhogs (sorry, can’t find the link). I have never laughed so hard. I registered once before before the big board crash of 2001 (?), but naturally forgot all my login information, so reregistered just this year, in response to Deadly Accurate’s question about weight loss.
STG
It was that stupid duck’s quack echo e-mail. I didn’t believe it, finally found a site that took it seriously, it was The Dope. I don’t remember whether I found the site from a search or an e-mail, but it was definitely the duck echo thingy…
I was surfing and it (SDMB) popped up. I thought “What the hell is this?” Shortly afterwards I was hooked.
Another Wisconsin Doper mentioned the site on a Wis.public radio program…I lurked for a while…registered …and now I post once in a great while. I still mostly lurk.
I found it on the old AOL site.
Cecil had answered a question about nickel-cadmium batteries, and I felt it was wrong, so I signed up for the message board and started posting.
As you can see here, it was before the great board crash, so my username is not listed. But I was the OP of thread # 8.
I’ve been around a long time. Is there such a thing as “honorary moderator” or something after so many years of posting?
I’ve said this before in another thread like this-oh well as no one asked here is the story again!
I saw a documentary on BBC2 (that’s the unpopular channel on British tv for all you foreign people 
) about Elmer Mccurdy the Oklahoma outlaw who after his death got stuffed and toured various sideshows and generally had a more succesful career post-mortem than pre. Intrigued by the story, I googled him, and found one of Cecil Adams’s columns, from there I read nearly the whole archive all at once and then I found the link to the message board…and well I never left! (practically)…lurked a long time before I posted though, more than a year. I think this was spring, 2000 iirc.
Strangely enough, I haven’t really read any of the Straight Dope columns since that day except when I find them linked to on the sdmb…I probably should rectify that, especially as I found them so enthralling when I first found them…