One of our longest, and certainly one of our highest-profile threads, was the thread about “What if Lord of the Rings had been written by someone else?”. Quite a few people apparently registered in order to post to that thread, and I recall wondering at the time how many of them would linger to read our forums and post to other threads; and how many would stay on once that thread was no longer active.
It’s been long enough now! Speak up – did you find the Straight Dope through a link to the LOTR thread? Where was it linked from? Did you immediately prowl the forums and read other threads, or only get around to that later on? How long before you were spending an appreciable portion of your time in here?
I joined because of that thread, which was linked to on theonering.net. I might have posted one of those “this is great” posts in there, but I never contributed to all the interesting writings. Pretty soon I found myself interested in a lot of the other threads and decided to register.
I think it took me a while to read anything outside of Cafe Society and it took me even longer to post much. I still find myself reading a whole lot more than I post nowadays, but I probably spend too much of my time here for my own good. Luckily, the semester’s over and I can be a computer nerd all I want.
I didn’t post to the thread, but it got me here. I got an email from my husband with the word “amusing” and a link to it. He had no idea what he set in motion.
A friend of mine signed on because of the LOTR thread. She had been making up her own parodies–the Simpsons version, the Muppets–and I sent her the link. She posted there and has since made only 3 or 4 other posts as far as I know.