Guys, I just found some fucking GOLD:
A website Aerith_Freak and Sheena made together back in 2000/2001...WHICH IS STILL FUCKING ONLINE:
http://pzrpg2.tripod.com/main.shtml
By reading all of your posts here I can tell that that forum was amazing. I'm kind of jealous now. Too bad I was born in 2000 :T_T:
It was definitely a different era. We were hardly the first kids to use the Internet (I never accessed the old mailing list systems, and I certainly never dialed into a BBS), but we were probably the last generation of kids to really embrace the Internet when embracing the Internet was a weird thing to do. Most of the people I knew in real life, kids my own age, thought that meeting/knowing people over the Internet was weird. They rarely or never used instant messengers or email. That was 'nerd stuff,' kinda.
I think the biggest difference between then and now is the way social media has become a monolith. Nowadays, the places where we meet and discuss things online are managed by giant corporations. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. Everyone you will ever meet has heard of the place that you hang out, and while you might carve out a niche for yourself by starting a facebook group or a g+ community, you're ultimately an insignificant part of the greater website.
When TSR was in its heyday, there really wasn't anything like that. Myspace and Friendster didn't really exist yet. There were things like Yahoo groups, but for the most part, "Social Media" (a term which didn't exist yet) was focused around small communities. If you engaged with the community, you could become prominent and well known among everyone on the whole site. And even the newest member could send a message to the administrator and expect a response.
I don't want to say that the old ways were better or worse. But they were different, and I do miss them.
BUT: Don't fall into the trap of wishing you were born earlier. I understand the desire. When I was your age* I wished desperately that I had been born 5-10 years earlier, so that I could have really experienced the rise of the internet, and the BBS era. I actually developed a really dishonest habit of finding something I thought was cool, doing a ton of research on its history, and then acting as though I "remembered" it. I sometimes still catch myself doing that without realizing it. Of course, if I actually had been 5-10 years older, then I would have found the hilarious / entertaining antics that were going on at TSR to be childish and annoying, and I never would have hung out there in the first place. =P
It's a fact: experience is sexy. A person who has already done cool things in their life is a cool person. But there are always cool things going on, and cool experiences to have. The trick is to engage with what's happening around you right now. Because in 15 years, the stuff that's happening right now will seem like some kind of badass wild west.
*I am deeply sorry for starting a sentence that way. It applies in this situation, but I know it makes me sound like a jackass.