GaiaOnline was where I have my fondest memories. I think I discovered it around 2004, 2005? I was in middle school at the time and was at that weird stage where I was discovering a lot new things in terms of interests. Anime just happened to be one and Gaia was a forum where a lot of anime fans gathered. What really drew me in was that it was the first active web community that I was a part of. A lot of people were nice and many were around the same age as me. It also helped that they had customizable avatars with clothing and such that you could buy on their marketplace. It was cool mix of an online RPG and a forum. And I got sucked right in.

I was a member until 2008 or so. It was beginning to decline, and as I was getting older my interests also changed. I realized I needed to be doing more extracurricular activities, than sitting on my desktop bumping my quest thread for 100 pages. All in all, I definitely do not regret being attached to that site for so long. I've met a lot of great people from there, and ended up becoming Facebook friends with some. I do miss it from time to time, especially the Roleplaying forum they had, but I'm glad I've moved on.

Slashdot. When it was still run by CmdrTaco, Microsft was represented by Bill Gates as a borg, and it was the frontpage of the geek Internet.

Believe it or not...G4TV's OT forum. Had some good times over there and met some pretty interesting people that I'm still friends with today. No place is perfect though as it had it's fair share of assholes and people who just wanted to create chaos. There was some drama but it never spiraled out of control. Lots of funny moments there. One that stood out the most to me was after a forum update people's locations were switched to Zimbabwe and I think some avatars defaulted to what was dubbed the Azn Gai.

I liked iichan, 4 chan, reddit, and Fark. Other than that I stayed on various single purpose sites.

I think my first real experience with an online community was the RuneScape member forums. After that, GameSpot, then RoosterTeeth. Lots of made-up compound words, now that I think about it. Then there was reddit, which dominated my online community experience for about six years.

I don't think I could pick a favorite. They all hold a special place in my heart. GameSpot, though, triggered my atheism. I grew up religious and had few doubts until I made an agnostic friend in real life. Even then, I held on. It wasn't until, in what ironically seems like an act of God, someone on GameSpot invited me to some sort of atheists' group. I'll never know why that was the moment that made me think, "Wait, is this valid?" I started researching and over the course of a few weeks, fell completely away from my faith. Been an atheist ever since.

So if I had to pick one that influenced me the most drastically, I'd have to go with GameSpot just for that one reason. The rest changed me in countless ways as well, but never in one particular issue.

Fark was my real introduction to web communities. I spent so many nights just constantly scrolling through there reading headlines and reading comments. Then I took about a four year break from the online work. When I came back Reddit was just starting to get bigger. It sucked up huge parts of my time, which was a huge plus during my time working at a company doing nothing all day. Saved me from going crazy for a good two years. Now I'm here until the next great break.

I was for a long time a die-hard RPG gamer. The trick though was that even if I did PnP (as in Pen&Paper as I played in a club with friends) I did a lot of RPG through forum. It helped me improve my grammar, synthax and overall writing quality (in my native language however aka French). All in all I played for 5 years on 10+ RP forum. I was an admin once too: on a hard sci-fi forum called Hegemony.

I am still a brony though. I watch ponies in my closet.

City of heroes (Europe). The community mods were awesome, the people were awesome(not without issues though). Meets were so much fun. They worked with Andrew Wildman's charity"draw the world together" to raise money by getting big comic book names to sketch peoples characters at the both at cons and expos (I got two done <3)

I even followed the mod"rockjaw" to swtor when he got a job with bioware he was such a great guy. Obviously that didn't pan out for anyone involved (lol)

But yeah. Meet my husband through city of heroes, meet so many long term friends in game and at meets.i keep in touch with more of them than school friends even though the game was shut down years ago :(.

I even got to talk to the head guy a few times when I started running player meets and they gave me a free statue to keep which was neat. He sits pride of place on my hi-fi ay the minute. I miss the game and the people loads.

Nsider was great! I really miss that community. It was an old nintendo forum that was actually run by Nintendo. So it got the benefit of both the large userbase and also the fact that some of the moderators were there full time. It was just an awesome experience being part of that forum. Then they suddenly closed down without even alerting a lot of their moderators. It was just so sad for a kid like me. It was the first end of a community for me, and this was around when I was just getting into computers and forums. I looked at Nsider2, a fan version of the site, a little bit later, but it just wasn't the same. The moderators were dicks and the community was just a lot worse.