Yeah, my take is that it’s about respect, and I have been asked why I bold names on other message boards.
I am proud to tell them I learned about the practice here.
Q
[QUOTE=DMark]
I am on a few other boards and nobody does it there.
[/QUOTE]
I am on quite a few other boards 
, and I have seen it elsewhere. Of course, the SDMB is a very large & well-known board, thus it is quite possible that others took the custom from us.
[QUOTE=DMark]
I am not quite sure why this thread was moved here…actually, I was looking more for an answer like, “We’ve been bolding names since 1999 when a drunk poster bolded all of his threads and we just started bolding his name as a joke and the habit caught on.”
[/QUOTE]
Bolding the names happened once. In 1960. In a post made from the bottom of the Mariana Trench…
(sorry - couldn’t resist)