I started lurking on 9/11 for some reason when I was 14, joined shortly after, and was very active from 02-06ish. There were a few "older" guys (probably 19-24 max) who were really into Indie music, which at the time was stuff like Neutral Milk Hotel, and arthouse films like Amélie and eventually Garden State. There were no features like chat, instant messaging, styling, or file uploads. Every user got stars based on how active they were and how long they had been here. I don't remember the specifics but it was like a status symbol. Regular users had smaller gold stars, moderators of specific forums had green stars, global moderators had purple stars, and admins were red. Putting a picture in your profile required a shortcode (see below).
There used to be a ton of Simpsons themed websites. I mean a lot. One of the more active forums here was for the Simpson website community. A lot of us were using it as a topic to learn web design/development (hi!), some just really enjoyed the content. There were even a few sites dedicated to simply ranking the top 100 or 50 Simpson sites (https://web.archive.org/web/20010517021250/http://www.simpsons100.com/ & https://web.archive.org/web/20030621043308/http://getduffed.com/).
There wasn't a ton of content and things like Wikipedia were years away from having what they have now, so we were creating episode guides manually. And it wasn't like we could watch any episode we wanted at any time like we can now. At the time, you were lucky if your house had a TIVO to record episodes when they aired; most didn't so we'd just write it when they aired. There were very few high quality Simpson graphics or images on the internet at the time, so we would take low res screenshots and basically trace/color them in programs like Macromedia Flash. The final product would be called a "Framegrab" and this became the most popular form of content for a while. People loved using them for desktop wallpapers or to print and cut out.
What else, what else? It was fun. I miss those days. Hope everyone is doing well. I'm glad to see this place is still around and kicking.
