I'm thankful that this site is still around. (What sites did you used to go to?)

Remembering who I was is nice. :shobon:

It's kinda weird to think about, but having been homeschooled when I was younger (other than one and a half years of public school) this website was a major part of my socialization growing up. And not to get too into anything but there was a heckton of trauma at the time and I'm not sure if the kind of person I would've grown up to be without community like this is someone I would be proud of. I don't know if that makes sense.

To give this a topic, what sites did you frequent when you first joined EoFF? For me it was emulation websites and gamefaqs almost exclusively.

Turning 32 in a month.

ONLY EOFF. MY DEDICATION TO THIS SITE IS UNMATCHED.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Christmas

ONLY EOFF. MY DEDICATION TO THIS SITE IS UNMATCHED.

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This is the way! https://duckduckgo.com/i/b36657710a73dcbe.png

One of the few surviving forums from my time. Sometimes it's fun (or embarrassing) to go back and read what I said when I was a kid.

It's a travesty everyone! It's been too long, I think I originally registered with my college address. that thing is long gone now. 20 years I suppose? Looking across the message boards. EyesOnFF. FFWA. ShinraOnline. Kraptastica. Maybe Truth and Beauty Bombs? I'm just grateful for this message board existing.

When I first joined? Oh man. 2000. Uhhhhh. Back then I was looking at the WWF site, had just ended my (rather short) time with Yahoo! Chatrooms... I think LiveJournal and DeadJournal were 2001. I'm pretty sure I was already using Penny Arcade back then, too. Homestar and eBaum's World were pretty current back then, right? And Newgrounds. And Geocities. And FriendTest. I'd also be using stuff like Napster, Kazaa, eDonkey, WinMX, etc. I'd also use something called... I think it was smsns or snsms? I dunno. Either way it allowed you to send texts to people's phones for free. Which back then was insane. I registered at, but did not frequent, many other FF boards, too.

But in the end I'm pretty sure 99% of my online time was spent at EoFF.

Of forums?

This and Pie and Bovril. Everything has has pretty much gone dead or is has been removed from the internet due to people not paying hosts anymore.

YTMND is still up, so we have that.

Something, something, Homestarrunner. I was actually just thinking about eoff today and how much of my high school free time was spent hanging out here or at least adjacently.

Remember how as the years went by on EoFF older members would talk about the golden age of the forums, and then more time would pass and other people would have different ideas of when the golden age actually was, and it seemed like this thing that was always shifting depending on your perspective and maybe there really was no true one singular golden age.

Well it’s 2025 now and with enough time and distance, I think I can unequivocally say that EoFF represented the BEST time period the internet ever had and will probably ever have in the future. Before the existence of Instagram, before Facebook turned boomer minds into mush, before Google’s ability to function as a search engine collapsed, before the complete astroturfing of the internet and AI spreading the most inane slop across the entire landscape. The dead internet is here now. I’m glad EoFF is still here and enough of us check in from time to time, because we really did have such a precious thing here - for a little while. My Livejournal is still in existence too, which is kind of fun to check in on once in awhile. I keep assuming the Russians will turn the lights off there one day too, but it hasn’t happened yet. Another beautiful relic of a bygone time on the internet.

The sites I used to visit most were EoFF, Yahoo fantasy sports, and LiveJournal. All three were connected to this place in some way. I don't think I intended to find an internet home when I stumbled upon this site, as most didn't, but once I found it, I knew I didn't really need to spend my time anywhere else.

I completely agree that the golden age of the internet was that 2000-2010ish period where the connection speeds had gotten decent enough and the internet was a pretty open and free place.

This site was extremely formative for me. It was cool to talk to so many people that were more mature and reasonable than I was when I was a teenager. Reading everyones posts even if I just lurked was a big chunk of so many days for me. It's a little surreal to look back on that join date now. Every little while I think back and hop back on here to check in. It's so wonderful to see it running even if I'm too embarrassed to read my old posts! I will always hold fond memories of this site, y'all are a good bunch.

As for what sites I frequented, I don't remember too well. Mostly here and another forum called basilmarket which was for an mmo I used to play. I spent a lot of time on forums, youtube and twitch. I'm sure there were others, but that memories been lost to time.

I remember other Final Fantasy sites like Glorious FF, and when I played FFXI, FFXIOnline for a lot of my time. Other than that, livejournal and xanga were huge back in the day. Newgrounds was also a big deal especially for 56Kers.

I do miss the closed nature of forums as each forum was unique and had their own group of folks that hung out with one another. Now everyone just go on Reddit or Twitter. If you want to hang out with folks then you would go on Discord. I have gotten worse at socializing online since, not to say that there were no positive outcomes with Discord.

I miss those days. Everything seems simpler.