I remember thinking very hard when FR finally asked for an email address in exchange for posting privileges. Up until then, pre-NSA, it was possible to be fairly anonymous and the trolls were few and far between (Ash, A+Bert, Murrymom, a few others).
I was working within the walls of one of the alphabet networks at the time, deep in enemy territory. But I figured, what the hell, what can they do to me? These days, no doubt, I'd be shown the door (actually, I'd be using TOR, but I digress).
Many times in those days I posted rolling headlines from the AP subscription-feed that I had access to, in order to illustrate the bias in the editing as stories were updated throughout the day. And Jim Robinson was the only other poster... Vanities were encouraged.
Fun times, long ago.
Yes. I lurked for a long time before I joined. Finally I wrote to JR privately, thinking that I might have known him in high school since he lived in my home town. We didn’t know each other, but one day somebody made me so mad that I had to join up to post a response! So my joining date is Nov. 1998, although I’d been lurking for months.