Ten years ago today (March 17th), I joined a forum for the very first time. It was BZPower, the Bionicle fan site. I had joined because I was reading one particular fanfiction that I really liked, and wanted to leave a comment or two. Over the months that followed, I learned a lot of things about interacting with other people on the internet, and some lessons came the hard way.
The most notable example was what I call "my biggest blunder on the internet". (Unfortunately, there is no way for me to show it to you. The archived forum of 2001-2010 was completely wiped out by a hacker attack last year.) After a particularly long time had passed since the latest update to that fanfic, I eventually got frustrated and left an angry comment, throwing in a profane word for good measure (censoring only the vowel, because I had foolishly thought that would be enough). I quickly received a warning for that. I apologized just as quickly and made sure I wouldn't repeat that mistake ever again. Not long after that, the review topic was closed and a new one was made (on BZPower, the actual story and the comments have to be in separate topics). I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one responsible for driving the author to do that, but the fact that I was still one of those people stuck with me. It's why, to this day, you will never see me use profanity online, and very rarely in real life, too. Ultimately, the lesson I learned for this incident is that people you communicate with online actually have lives outside of the internet, so you shouldn't expect them to respond as quickly as you'd like.
I did slip up a few more times after that, but none were bad enough to receive another warning, so I won't go into further detail. Once that certain fanfic was finally finished a few months later, my activity slowed down a bit. I was still just as excited about Bionicle, but I had lost interest in communicating with others. It wasn't until October 2012 that I finally decided to log in to BZPower regularly again, if only to read interesting comments and hardly post anything. (As fate would have it, this would turn out to be the first of many steps that ultimately led me to becoming a fan of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, but that's another story.)
I joined GoF in December 2007, more than three and a half years after joining my first forum. I think the lessons I learned back in 2004 helped to give me more realistic expectations when I first came to this site, allowing me to get along well with everyone and even have the confidence to write my own fanfiction for the first time ever (an experience that officially proved to me why you should never expect too much from a fanfiction writer, because now I was one). As the years passed, I have seen some then-new members here (I won't name them, even if I could remember them) who behaved pretty much the same way I did back in 2004. Some (like me) have since learned their lessons, while others sadly haven't. All of this has led me to create this word of wisdom: "Everyone makes dumb mistakes when they're 13." (I went with that particular number because that's how old I was when I made "my biggest blunder on the internet", and that seems to be the age of most of those then-new members I mentioned.)
I've definitely come a long way in the last ten years. I may have had a rough start, but once I understood what was and wasn't acceptable, I've had almost no trouble to speak of. As someone who always had extreme difficulty talking to others in person, the time I've spent communicating with others on forums like this has helped to ease my anxiety and make me just a little bit more comfortable talking to others. I don't know what lies ahead for me, but I'm very confident that my worst moments (at least, when it comes to the internet) have long since passed.
