About two or three days before the birth of her baby at the beginning of September (a girl, by the way, healthy and adorable and a natural-born nurser.) She emailed me again the other day with an update (short version: everyone’s doing well, but tired) and said she hopes to have the energy and time to post here again soon.
I know, it feels like it’s been longer to me, too!
I’ve been a member for about almost three years as Largo62 (I’m now 65), but I was a member before that for at least a couple of years as DesertGeezer. I haven’t been by in a while, because I’ve been pretty wrapped up with YouTube. I like the immediacy of video. There are text comments also, but I hate the arbitrary 500-character limit they put on text responses, and the arbitrary limit on responses themselves. Still, I really like the medium.
I still jump over here once and a while to see what’s up.
Man, I don’t know how you do it. I enjoy YouTube for the enormous number of searchable video clips, but I can’t even read the comment areas or my faith in humanity starts to plummet. It just seems full of 14 year old boys calling each other “faget.” 
There are some of those, of course. But even here on the SDMB there are a handful of people who just rant without saying anything. Over all, the discourse here and at YouTube is better than that. Some videos aren’t worth watching. You can usually tell before you get too far into them and just turn 'em off and go someplace else. If people fill your comments with crap you can block and/or remove them. I do block people who do what I call “drive-bys,” where they just fling insults without making a point. I don’t welcome them back. But I leave their nasty posts up so others know why they were blocked. It works for me.
I’ve been lurking since a college professor introduced me to his dope addiction in '01. I ponied up in '04.
What I want to know is, how do I find a board in it’s infancy? I know what the OP is getting at and while I’ll always call SDMB home, as my first forum, I want to get involved in new forums.
In 2000 or 2001, it was possible to hitch onto the wagon of a rising message board, and years later find yourself the elite equivalent of the 99ers on the SDMB. Today, it’s much more difficult. New SDMBs, Something Awfuls, Off-Topics and whatnot, at least where English is the primary language used, are few and far between.
Even if you get involved in a new board, there’s no guarantee that it will be successful. The vast majority of new message boards are dismal failures, and your hard work in posting may, without notice, vanish into the ether of cyberspace.
With a few exceptions, vanity forums (“Joe’s Really Cool Message Board”, etc) don’t have a good success rate. Some boards with “build it, and they will come” topics like car tuning, specific car models, and anime have a much higher success rate, but they might not deal in subject matter that’s interesting to you, nor have a diverse userbase.
You might want to check out the “review my site” posts on various message board operator message boards (very meta, I know), and look over some of the posts on the vBulletin and Invision Power Board support forums (vBulletin’s forum is open to the public; I don’t know about IPB’s.)