How did you get your start posting in forums ?

For me, it was an online website called “Postloop”.
Postloop was a way for new forums to get members and content when they first started up a forum, and for writers to get paid for content writing. Forums needed writers to attract other writers, and about the only way to get that was to pay for content writers, write on other forms in exchange for posts on your own forum, or just let the forum slowly build up with members, which often didn’t work.

Content writers didn’t earn much money, but we got to choose which forums interested us, and then interact with good content and start new threads; so this was my “training “ on how to post content in forums, and I enjoyed it for quite a few years, and actually still belong to a couple of those forums still.
Eventually, what happened to postloop was that it became flooded with writers who either didn’t speak fluent English, or even some that used an online translator, because what was just pennies in the US was a lot of money in some of the other countries.

This dropped the value of the content because the foreign writers usually had no idea what they were even writing about and just made meaningless posts, which did the new forums no benefit and usually even hurt the forum because the posts were so awful, and so eventually Postloop just closed down. But it was a lot of fun when it worked right, I made a little pocket money, and learned to enjoy posting on forums.

I can't remember exactly how I found the first forum that I really dove into, but it was a place called The Wrestling Source back in 2008-2009. I had been watching wrestling for a while and enjoyed playing the games on Playstation 2. I think I was just googling wrestling sites and found it. I thought it looked cool so I jumped in and started posting with my (terrible) wrestling opinions.

After a while I started branching out to the different sections and learned how to use Photoshop, learned some animation, and talked a lot in the general section. I made a lot of friends that I talked to through MSN and AIM pretty often and shared a lot of music with one friend in particular. If I was home from school or work, I was on that forum. For a little wrestling forum it was surprisingly active and it seemed like everyone was trying to get that high post count.

I made it to nearly 1500 posts before the site eventually shut down. It was a sad day. Whenever I reminisce about that site I always shout out the people who made the experience so nice. eXcellence and Koonze, if you happen to read this, you guys were awesome and I hope to hear from you one day. Koonze, thank you sharing your journey through music genres with me, it helped shape my current music tastes quite a bit and I was shocked at some of the amazing music you turned showed me.

I was thinking about that forum a couple weeks ago and that's actually what led me to find this forum. Glad to be back to this format compared to modern social media sites.

For me, it started when I launched my own forum back in 2005-2006. I was a young teenager then. It's been about 20+ years since I first launched the original version of my forum.

I eventually ventured out into the world of other online communities and have been in love with forums ever since.

I actually prefer forums over social media, but they're both my favorites these days. I love the community atmosphere of forums better as they're more tight-nitted than social media and bonds are a lot easier to form.

Got started posting daily in the second forum I joined. It was 2009. The topic was fitness and weight loss. Everyone kept a daily food diary. Lost a lot of weight--2 pounds a week. Peer pressure helped me, especially because I was the oldest member. We had weight loss challenges and fitness challenges. I stayed around to provide moral support to the others until the forum was "disappeared" a couple years later, without notice. Otherwise I'd probably still be a member.