Blastback wrote:Cyber Bishop wrote:Blastback wrote:To be fair, alot of us in the threads were either in highschool or college, so we were pretty immature, just having fun.
And I was at my old job while posting.. I could do a lot while the machines were cycling through their programs..
This was the first forum I'd joined, and I got so excited I spent to much time on it and not enough studying, so I kept getting grounded at one point. When I got back, several of the people I'd come to be freinds with were gone..
Contributed to me being a very on and off member.
That's pretty much my story with this forum too - although I never got grounded.
It was the first forum I ever joined. Found it after I'd bought the first wave of Dreamwave comics that rekindled my interest in Transformers, and that ultimately led me to join the forum. IIRC my username was MatrixPrime back then. Crazy to think in just a few years I'll have been a member for 20 years. Although life got in the way far too often for me to be a regular for most of that time. When I first joined, I was still in high school. My activity slowly petered out when college started getting in the way around 2006. Since that time I've gotten a degree, I've been engaged and left standing at the altar, lost my dad to cancer, my brother to homicide, had a ton of poopy jobs, a couple of nice jobs, moved countries a couple of times for work, and ended up in my dream job as a college professor (History), only to be forced into an early retirement after two grueling battles with cancer, the most recent of which was in late 2019. It's been a weird, very unpredictable, wild ride, but I can't promise it's made me more mature than I was before.
I do miss the days when every time you'd refresh the main forum page after an hour or so there'd been a couple dozen new topics and replies spread across the different forums, though. I guess it's something that has affected nearly every forum, with the advent of Facebook and other social media. But I still think a forum like this is a far better place to have in-depth discussions about things you're passionate about. I also think the atmosphere here has generally been much more relaxed and welcoming than the major Transformers groups on Facebook. For some reason people just really seem to enjoy acting like jerks for no reason on modern social media.
In spite of the flame wars and fights that went hand in hand with much of our userbase still being relatively young at the time, and the handful of elitist wang rods, I always felt the kind and welcoming people far outweighed the more elitist or toxic ones on Seibertron. And while until recently my post-2007 visits were sporadic at best, I still consider this my home on the internet more than any other forum out there. Do miss a lot of the old-timers that are no longer here, though.
On that note - anyone know whatever happened to Abrogate? Seemed like he just fell off the radar sometime around the mid-00s.