Well, sure - there’s knuckleheads, too. 
Yeah… being on messageboards for 13 years makes me seem like a noob on this thread, and I’m pretty sure that’s not the case compared to Dopers in general, let alone the general populace.
Oh, I started on Quantumlink in the early to mid 1980s, and my husband and a couple of his buddies also had a VERY small message board. Q-link had a few message boards, but it also had a lot of chat rooms, which is where I mostly hung out. After Q-link, I was on US Videotel, and then got onto AOL when they went to the all you can surf buffet model. That’s where I found the SDMB, the ORIGINAL AOL version.
We need at least one person from the “less than one year” and the “5-6 year” groups to reply so we have all the (arbitrary) gaps covered.
Something I’m curious about is whether the catch-all “Over 16 years” category disguises the fact that after the other peak period of 13-14 years the 2-year periods might be taken on out to some point to reveal a true bell-shaped distribution. What’s the most likely maximum? 50 years? Were there “message boards” in the 60’s?
Another more liberal set of years gaps might help solve that mystery, but this one is revealing enough, I guess.
Comments?
The SDMB was my deflowering, so to speak.
I’ve been posting to message boards for just over 20 years, but I really only became ‘a Message Board person’ when I discovered the SDMB shortly after it made the jump from AOL to the Web in early 1999.
Before that, I posted to Usenet bulletin boards occasionally, and to an in-school bulletin board at the college I was teaching at in the 1990s, but it wasn’t really more than a trivial part of my life until I got hooked on the Dope.
About 20 years. BBSs are when I came in; I still remember MamaCat, who was the only one who regularly kicked my butt at trivia on <whatever the name of that one BBS was>, lol.
Only here.
I joined the Dope in 2000 - it’s my first board. I’ve tried some others but I seem to start and end here.
I was on BBSs in the late 80s and joined GEnie in 1989.
Argh! I didn’t bother to read the OP!
Counting Prodigy, and Compuserve, my answer should have been “over 16 years”.
I assumed that message board meant like the SDMB. I made an ass out of me.
I had a modem and membership on Delphi and Compuserve in the 80’s, but never found much interesting. In the fall of '96, my youngest went off to a residential highschool. Aruuuuuuuuuuugh!. Dad felt he had no choice but to get into email. A few years later he found a Quadra under the Christimas Tree and really started using the net. It wasn’t until early 2000 I got started on Xpertsite.com answering dog questions. It is long gone and so are many of the other sites I have been active on. Others. the moderators were more sympathetic to those I offended than to me. The premium dog food reps don’t like my views. The SD often isn’t welcome, even here sometimes.
Met my wife on a Buffy board back in '02. Started hanging out at alt. Callahans on Usenet rather a bit before that, say '93 or so. So over 16 years all told, although I didn’t get seriously into it until this place.
I was active on AOL chat room in the '90s. I met my husband in one. Then, in '02 or '03 I found the 'Dope. Been here ever since. I lurked for 3 or 4 months before joining.
This is my first and, other than a brief flirtation with the Giraffe board, my only. I’ve gone to some other online forums for computer problems, etc., but not as a regular poster.
Does Wikipedia count as a Message Board? I know that Wikipedia is mostly an online encyclopedia. It also happens to be the very first website that I have used to communicate and contribute my words online. I started using it in 2006, but I had used the Internet for a very long time before, since 1997. Between 1997 and 2006, I didn’t know that Message Boards existed. I mostly used the Internet for school research.
I started on BBSs in the early 1980s, so it’s about 30 years for me.
Gad. I was on some BBSs in the Twin Cities back in the '80s. I can’t even remember the names of them. Seems to me there was some publication that had a list of them with no other useful information, so you just had to cross your fingers and dial and hope you came across something that was not totally perverted.
I am…ancient :(.
This is really the only one I have used regularly. You can see my join date right there. I read the columns on the old AOL site but only read the old board in passing. Lost track of the SD for a few years then joined here. Been on a couple others but not much.
My first USENET posts were in 1989.