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.
For me it started when I decided to sign up to become a beta tester for an online dial up community that was run by a local newspaper. I had a baby in the house and yearned for some conversations that went beyond baba, momma and daddy.
From there I went into the world of Christian forums, some of them long gone now, but I have friends from those old ones. What I like about the various Christian forums is that we tend to keep in contact and some of us even sent Christmas cards by snail mail for years.
So to answer the question, it was for adult contact and then for like-minded friends.
I remember visiting the forums several times but I don't recall engaging much. I suppose I was too attached to the official boards and my board where most of my contributions were made. I remember WWX created an automated code index and I created a manual code index of all the codes and skins found on the InvisionFree Support board. Many people contributing to the network is one of the reasons it turned out so good. There were resource forums and promotion forums left and right.
I had an interest in visual basic programming as a hobby. I created a site to share the programs I made. I hacked up a Frontpage extension guestbook script to use as a forum. I was getting tons of email asking how to use what I was giving away. That morphed into my interest in forums.
I have always been amazed at how people engage on forums and the amount of information you can obtain. There was a time when forums were the place to go if you had a problem to solve. They still are. Just not to the level they used to be.
Interesting to note that Stack Overflow has had a substantial drop the last couple of years. It was already in decline before that but the last couple of years (since ChatGPT) have been more substantial.
I wonder if the pendulum is about to swing back the other way (or, more accurately, how long it's going to take for the pendulum to swing back the other way, when people want to start reclaiming things)
