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I am still in contact with people I met on the old AOL message boards in 2002. I met two of them in person, and one I am in contact with I still hope to meet.
I've met several people from City-Data in real life, including another mod, and I'm "friends" on FB with more. Yes, "friends" on FB is a different animal than a real life friend, but we know one another's names and things about our lives.
Another poster and I on the NJ forum also came to realize we worked for the same employer and had likely been in the same meetings once or twice along the way. He doesn't post anymore. I don't think anything happened to him, he just retired before I did and moved south and started a new life.
Similar here. I met my very good friend in Spain on one of first immigration boards. Our husbands turned friends. Even my mother is in touch with her some 20 years later.
Another one turned into the big sister I never had. Our families visited while we lived in Alabama. She and her husband spent time with my parents in Europe. We talk at least once a week. Then there are those you loose. Painful when you really connected and met but it happens.
A lot of people move around quite a bit; get bored with a forum, and move on. Message boards are constantly shifting, changing, evolving... people may really love the way a board "clicks" for a few years, but as more and more new people join and add their voices, the board changes - and sometimes it changes into something that people who were really comfortable with it for several years no longer find interesting. So they move on. To them, the forum has "jumped the shark" and is no longer worth bothering with, but to other people just finding it for the first time it may be exactly what they were looking for.
And then they become the posters who dominate the forum and then, 5 years later, everyone will be reminiscing about and wondering what happened to them.
I'd almost be willing to bet she never existed. Some of those stories strained credibility.... I had a hard time believing that a landlady would be comfortable letting someone with all of those strange habits live in her home for such a long time.
I'm still in contact with someone I met on a message board back in the early 2000s myself. Frequent contact.
In fact, there she is right now, petting the cat. We've been married 14 years.
Personally, I love the stories and sometimes you feel hope, a connection. Back when I was a tween and teen, I had pen pals. I ended up meeting quite a few later on in life.
I think the above was a nasty comment. Just keep those thoughts to yourself if you feel like that. I'd like to feel there are still some out there with feelings and sometimes, this place is a good sounding board.
Your own family may not give the best advice sometimes; it's nice to hear opinions.
Some people pour their heart out here; the Grieving Forum has been helpful many a time. I think we should all try to be here and support one another in this crazy world and be uplifting not so negative.
Too much negative makes me wants to go eat a bowl of ice cream - and that's not good for me
I'll join you (virtually) with that bowl of ice cream, Bette. Your post is excellent and indicative of the kind of person you are. I also had pen pals when I was a young girl and online forums can be similar once you become familiar with individual posters.
Now that I know you share my weakness (ice cream) I like you even more!
Oh yeah, guys like TexasReb (he had a stroke in 2015-16, he's been showing more activity as of late), city_data91 same age who lived just across the state line from me (inactive since 2014), UKWildcat (banned in 2015) who was the same age as me and faced identical issues.
Others like eggalegga, a non-Mormon in Utah who was my age, and smel I miss quite a bit too.
Yes, a lot of people seemed to have disappeared from CD the last few years. Why are so many people dropping out. Anyone have any ideas?
Everyone has a different connection to this place. Some people have posted here finding it strange that we miss others. They likely would disappear without a word and not think anything of it. Others, like me, have been on here for 10 years or more.
I first started posting as a 19 year old in college. Now, I'm 34. This forum has seen me through a stage IV cancer diagnosis and treatment, the death of one of my closest friends, and many other big life events. I've gone from choosing between eating and filling prescriptions, to a relatively successful management career and watched people I know in the forum grow to be parents and grandparents, move, and experience highs and lows. For me, coming here is a habit and most of the subfora are ways for me to exercise expressing my opinions.
For the others, there are other forums and channels for this kind of discourse. This type of forum feels really dated, so it may not attract or retain people the way it did 10 or even 5 years ago. There are other options that are more active, more/less anonymous, and more focused.
People have also backed off of their digital life in the past 5 or 6 years. I see it in my career, and I see it here. People are on digital platforms more than ever, but are abandoning places with political squabbles and heightened emotions. That may impact our usership here too.
Yes, a lot of people seemed to have disappeared from CD the last few years. Why are so many people dropping out. Anyone have any ideas?
When I left, it was in large part because of the escalating attempts to isolate, e.g., discussion of science from religion, religion from philosophy, etc. Sometimes these areas very much overlap, and discussion organically wants to cross lines that management has decided aren't to be crossed. Another obstacle to organic flow in conversations is that it's quite normal for a discussion to evolve, sometimes even to the point it's mostly unrelated to the original topic that it started with. This is not inherently a Bad Thing in my view. I think deliberate derailing of threads with actual tangents coming from one person can and should be policed, but abruptly shutting down a thread that people are invested in because it has by mutual consent or normal evolution taken a different direction, is in my view tone-deaf and ham-fisted.
Combine the above with an almost comical aversion to even the mildest profanity -- another organic part of normal conversation -- and I just needed to go someplace where I'd be treated like an adult for awhile. And where I can give all the likes I want without constantly being told I'm not liking enough different people.
The strength of these fora is a lot of variety in one place, though, and it's (mostly) nice to be back. These days, I alternate between here and a place where I'm not always having to censor and work around various arbitrary constraints. The downside of that place is a lot lower volume of posters and a more limited set of topics.
I hasten to add, the owners of this site have every right to set whatever rules they please, however counterproductive I may think them. I abide by those rules, as the price ($0) is right.
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. Hint: Not the dead ones.