Another bored.com person here. I loved the columns, then lurked for a maybe a year before I joined up.
Poysyn - it’s all her fault. I’m now an addict.
I think I got infected by New York Press, which carried him. I don’t think I even had a computer at the time. Then I did and went there. Then I saw an icon for a message board…the rest is history.
My father has had a lifelong fascination with how flies land on the ceiling. Do they land halfway through a barrel roll, or at the top of half a loop? So I googled, and found some Cecil guy had a column about it (and it turns out flies land on the ceiling neither of those ways, employing a much cooler method). That introduced me to the Straight Dope and Cecil, and I went to the site a few times over the next year or so, but I didn’t notice the forums. When I did, I joined up straight away. I was never a lurker.
Hey hey, TheLoadedDog are you going to tell us how flies land on the ceiling or just leave us hanging? I don’t remember this article and never have any luck with the search engine.
What’s in it for me? 
Oh okay then…
Mr Fly will gain altitude in the normal right-way-up attitude (wings on top, legs dangling down) until he is pretty much sliding the top of his body along the ceiling. Then, he throws the front set of legs up over his head, and the sticky feet grip the ceiling. The front end of the fly has now decelerated wildly, but the rest of the fly has forward momentum, so this makes the body flip through 180 degrees, and the remaining sets of legs hit the ceiling and grip. Our friend is now facing back towards the direction he flew from.
Since reading the article, I’ve watched it happen. It’s too fast to see, but you can see the fly is always facing back the way it came. Quite cool, I thought.
I followed a link from DVD Talk. The CS thread was so funny I registered there and then and became a lurker who steps out into the light occasionally.
I had some Jehovah’s Witnesses come up to my door, and I thought it would be interesting to engage them and convince them they were wrong. I went off on a rant about evolution and after not convincing them of anything, I figured I need to bone up on my evolution debating skills. Google brought me here.
My local weekly newspaper carried the Straight Dope back in the 80’s and I was really pissed when the weeklies merged and dropped the column (AND Ernie Pook’s Comeek AND Life in Hell). It was good to have it back.
The JW’s came back and I didn’t do any better convincing them, but I found my argument to be more compelling.
A colleague recommended the website for Cecil’s columns - that led me to the message boards, but it was this thread (Return of The Princess Bride Jedi??) that got me hooked. That and a thread on how to cure left-handedness (a la fundamentalist style cures for homosexuality), which I can no longer find…
And here I am.
Grim
Someone sent me a link to the “If LOTR had been written by someone else!?” thread, which was already a monster, and as the natives were friendly, I stuck around.
It was the A&E show, which included a reference to the AOL boards. I was on there for a while under the handle KyleKatarn, then when the SD moved to the actual web I registered this name and forgot about it for a while. I rediscovered the Dope, rediscovered my name and password, and the rest is (forgotten) history.
Serendipity.
I was looking for Dave Barry stuff back in late 2000, using Yahoo search engine (ah, the days before Google’s ubiquity!) and saw “The Straight Dope” in the results. Seeing as I’ve read Cecil’s books since the mid 1980s here (available only at secondhand bookstores for some reason), I couldn’t believe my luck. Online Cecil! I saw there was a messageboard, thought, “Well what the heck do I know about messageboards?” At that time, zilch.
Come January 2001, I took the plunge and made my first post – calling the movie Dante’s Peak a crock. I’m still here. 
www.bored.com brought me to the dope.
And I’m not going to give out any prizes for people who guess why I went to www.bored.com
I was waiting for a lecture at uni to start and when the lecturer plugged in his computer the Straight Dope front page was projected for everyone to see. I found one of the column titles amusing so jotted down the name and told my self I’d take a look at it. I forgot all about it until exam time rolled around and I came across it while re-reading my notes. I googled the term and have been here ever since.
Just as a side note, right before exams is really the worst time to find the biggest procrastinatory device on earth.
The front page was linked by some other website. Couldn’t tell you which. Loved the columns, I spent a week probably killing time in college reading everything in the archive. When I couldn’t find any new columns to browse through I noticed that there was the message board GQ section with more questions and a large amount of fairly intelligent people to ask/answer. So the GQ sort of fed my SD column browsing jones. I signed up to ask a couple questions I’ve had in my head, and that was that.
Then there was about a 2-4 year period where I never logged on. I came back about 2 years ago and began posting and reading again, and then it wasn’t until I wandered into one of Sampiro’s threads telling hilarious stories about his family. I was reading it thinking, “this guy is hilarious”! So I kept reading, and kept reading, and it was then, for* really * the first time I was noticing a lot of posters really seemed to know one another, and talk to one another. It was not just a board where people posted questions and answers, or told stories, but it really did seem like the “community” atmosphere was not just bunk.
I’ve bought in ever since and I’ve been an addict. I mostly dope at work, to kill time on an overnight shift.
I stumbled into an Uncle Cecil column. I read just about every culmn he had online and kept noticing that little “Message Board” link. “Who’d quibble about this?” I remember thinking. I remember seeing Threadspotting and never reading the threads. I think I took a plunge after curiousity finally took root. I do know that the saga of Hal was one of the first threads I read. I lurked for a little bit, maybe a few months, until I got my credit card. The rest is alllllllll history, baby.
I’m not sure of the what, but I know the how. There was something I didn’t know and wanted to find out. Back in late 1999/early 2000 I did a search - I think it was on the yahoo search engine, but it may have been google. I found that this fella named Cecil had answered the question. Then I found that he had answer lots of questions. Every question I had, he had already answered. I distinctly remember how he found out that a duck’s quack did indeed echo. He had to hold the duck above his head and run with it to get it to quack - funny stuff. That, of course lead me here. I lurked for about a year before I finally got the courage to get my guest membership.
I was trying to find the NATO (I think) alphabet. You know, the one the military uses.
Alpha
Bravo
Charlie
etc.
My search engine pulled up a link to the dope, among others, and I remembered fondly my old boyfriend who had all the books back in college so this was the link I chose. I’ve been hanging out ever since.
i got here through a cite link at www.snopes.com on one of their urban legend stories several years ago. lurked for a very long time and eventually joined.