I started using forums to talk to people who researched the various glitches found in the Generation 1 Pokemon games. Also to talk to other Teen Titans fans as these two forums were the first ones I joined and sadly neither one of them exist anymore. (Glitch City only exists as a Discord server now and Titans Go is long gone.)
Frankly speaking I started using forums for searching and knowing about online earning opportunities. In this process I gained good knowledge about all sites. I earned few bucks.
It was probably in the late 90s/early 00s and I'd been reading a lot of Lord of the Rings fanfic. If I remember correctly, someone had mentioned a LOTR RPG site and I was curious, so I joined. Been living the forum life ever since.
I used to play a game called Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II for the Xbox, where a bunch of guys I played with made a group together and used an InvisionFree forum to communicate outside of the game. I forgot what it is exactly, but they had a pretty cool code installed that linked back to iFusion. At the time, we were.. well, doing less-than-legit things in the game involving hex editing, so seeing people write codes for the forum we were using made me interested in trying to learn how to do that as well. I decided to stick around iFusion to learn Javascript, which led me to the rest of the network.
There weren't really a lot of guides that I remember, so I would take codes that others had written, put them on my forum, and tweak them to learn what was happening and what each line meant. I even made code requests for specific things that I wanted to learn. After a while, I started trying to fill others' requests and eventually (sort of) made a name for myself.
Honestly, everyone back then was incredibly helpful. It was awesome to see a community that was so eager to help others, and for free at that. I'll always be grateful to WWX for iFusion and the community that came together around it. Those were good times.
