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Original poster

To ask what the strangest thing you did online as a teenager was?

314 replies

Username73638 · 20/02/2025 20:31

I’ll go first… when I was about 12 or 13 (mid-00s) I signed up to a UK mum/baby forum - I can’t remember what it was called but it was a bit like Mumsnet but way, way smaller, everyone knew everyone - and created a whole fake life and made a load of ‘friends’ on there who were presumably women in their 20s-40s. This was when the internet was a very different place and everyone had their kids’ names and DOBs on ‘tickers’ I think they were called in their signatures. There was minimal anonymity. I had a fake husband and a couple of fake kids with names and back stories and then ‘got pregnant’ and tracked a whole pregnancy and birth. All of my online ‘friends’ were really excited to hear the birth announcement and helped me pick the baby’s name. I made up a fake birth story. There was actually an in-person meet up with all the kids that I was invited along to but obviously I couldn’t go, I pretended that one of my kids was sick.

I still remember some of the names of the women and their kids and think about how old the kids would be now (in their 20s!)

Anyway after 1-2 years, can’t remember exactly how long, a group of them realised I was fake and ‘confronted’ me online. I didn’t confess but deleted my account and never went back.

I had a difficult home life and I think I wanted to imagine the happy family I might have when I grew up. It was a bit of an obsession though and I spent so many hours on there, basically every afternoon and evening after school. I’ve never done anything similar since, my catfishing days were over after that!

Did anyone else do anything similar online as a teenager, pretending to be anyone else or something?

OP posts:
UnderHisEeyore · 20/02/2025 23:35

I remember going online with dial-up sometime at the end of the 90's and "meeting" an American boy who was really rude and said something like "Oh great, a Brit. Bet you have shit teeth and can only cook roast beef." I was outraged, weirdly. Am not at all amazed social media is a cesspit as a result though.

ItWasntMyFault · 20/02/2025 23:35

I remember a parenting site with tickers - I think it was called Hunnybeez or something like that?

DopeyS · 20/02/2025 23:34

MayaPinion · 20/02/2025 20:55

When I was 16 my mum and dad went away for a few days leaving me in charge of my 14 year old sister and her 14 year old friend from school who was staying with us for a few days. Because my mum wasn’t there to drink 60 cups of milky tea a day we had a surplus of milk so we wrote a note to cancel a few days, popped it in a milk bottle, and put it in the porch.

Instead of writing ‘No milk today’ we wrote what we thought was an hilarious poem, the jist of what I can’t remember. The milkman’s son found it and gave it to his mother who then thought the milkman was having an affair with my mother. The whole milk family arrived on our doorstep looking for my mum and we had to explain to them all (and my parents) that we’d written it for fun. I’m 55 now and I’m still mortified when I think of it 😳

Goddam milk mafia out for a showdown 😂

Franjipanl8r · 20/02/2025 23:33

Anon501178 · 20/02/2025 20:41

This reminds me of when circa 2000 aged 12/13 I secretly used to listen to Graham Torrington's 'Late night love' on the radio with my headphones 😂 I was an only child with older religious parents so they would have been mortified if they knew, but it taught me all the juicy bits about romance and relationships that they would never have done and was probably more useful than the PHSE lessons at school for setting me up in such areas! 🤭😂

Show quote history

OMG late night love!! Graham Torrington was a bit intense but so good!

Hollyhedge · 20/02/2025 23:32

there was no online.

bigkahunaburger · 20/02/2025 23:32

was it 'birth' ?

JustGotToKeepOnKeepingOn · 20/02/2025 23:30

Internet wasn't around until I was well into my 30s 😜

dogpool · 20/02/2025 23:30

Ladamesansmerci · 20/02/2025 23:26

Glad it wasn't just me learning coding to spread fandom joy as a teen 🤣

Also please tell me the game was Cats/Dogz 5!!! I was obsessed with it. I took was involved in the forum and downloaded the weird hexed pets!!

Show quote history

Yes!! Well I played Petz 4 not 5 and there was definitely snobbery about those who played 5 😂

Ladamesansmerci · 20/02/2025 23:29

Serriadh · 20/02/2025 22:12

Cannot believe no one’s admitted to fanfic yet. Or is that just mainstream now?

I was in Harry Potter fandom in the early 00s. Absolutely mental. You’d start off with wish fulfilment about how the sexy new female teacher is the only person who understands poor handsome unloved Snape and end up reading some 40yo American bloke’s paedophilic musings about Hagrid bumming Harry.

Not me, a 31 year old adult, sat reading fanfic whilst my 8mo DD is sleeping 👀 not ones with Hagrid bumming Harry though, lmao. Fanfic is full of crazy shit but there are some great ones!!

Ladamesansmerci · 20/02/2025 23:26

dogpool · 20/02/2025 22:50

I made a fandom website for Orlando Bloom 😂this was during his peak popularity with LOTR and the first Pirates of the Caribbean. You could then register your fandom page on an "official" fandom directory and it would be listed alongside other sites, so people could collect little GIFs made by each official fandom page and put it on their own websites to show they too supported that actor/film/character etc. A much more innocent time!

I was also in an online community about a virtual pet game where you could adopt, breed and show your virtual cat/dog. Some learned to hex code and mod the cats and dogs into all sorts of cool things!

I did learn a lot about basic HTML and coding during this period of my life and these definitely helped me get into my career more than my degree ever did😅

Glad it wasn't just me learning coding to spread fandom joy as a teen 🤣

Also please tell me the game was Cats/Dogz 5!!! I was obsessed with it. I took was involved in the forum and downloaded the weird hexed pets!!

beesnests · 20/02/2025 23:26

I did the same thing!

It started on chat rooms in about 2000. I told people I was 21 and from Canada, but I lived a few blocks from Bleecker St in NYC. Both of my parents were dead and I didn't have a lot of money but I could figure skate. When people asked for a pic I sent them a photo of Alanis Morissette, but I got caught out once so stopped using it and found a blurry photo of a random woman on a subway. I moved on to forums, and when 9/11 happened my online friends started sending me frantic messages asking if I was ok and what was happening where I was, so I described what I was seeing on TV and told them that's what I saw. I said that as soon as it was safe to travel, I was going to stay with my aunt Margaret in Quebec for a while. I almost got found out when someone asked me how much I weighed and I made up a weight for myself in stones, but I managed to save it by saying I bought my scales in England.

strawberryblue · 20/02/2025 23:24

1-: used to put on (awful not convincing! American accents and pretend we had just moved from America (to anyone walking past)

2- call up a takeaway called "hot spot" and when they answered saying "hello hot spot" say you know where my hot spot is and hang up 🤣

TunipTheVegimal24 · 20/02/2025 23:23

SnipSnipMrBurgess · 20/02/2025 22:35

A lot of inappropriate a/s/ in a PUBLIC Internet cafe. Looking back i bet the people behind the counter knew EXACTLY what I was up to!

I remember being on Heat magazines website which had a chat forum and spinning a tale of my sister dying in a crash with her husband and I laws and I had to take on their 4 children 🙃

I also used to use the mobile chat rooms on my phone from O2, and i don't know if anyone remembers it's my.com? I used to moderate some of their rooms, then it was all shut down one day!

Did you at least win the prize for best story that week? The lie would have been worth it for a £5 Claire's Accessories voucher, no doubt 😂

mumda · 20/02/2025 23:22

FlowerUser · 20/02/2025 21:26

I remember calling 100 for the Operator in the 80s to ask who sang Goodness Gracious Me because my boyfriend and I couldn't remember. It was Peter Sellers. Now we would Google it.

At uni I rang to ask what time the film was on..
Definitely not the eldest thing I did though.

Ladamesansmerci · 20/02/2025 23:21

KindLemur · 20/02/2025 23:07

I am a 90s baby so I have a lot of these !
my friends did some crazy shite too

  1. when home internet was first becoming a thing I was 7-8ish. My brother (older) made me an email address and AOL had tons of forums and chat rooms for kids. It’s very obvious now that the early days of internet predators were starting to emerge and decide talking to small kids online was something they could do with no recourse, it just wasn’t ’a thing’ to consider. I remember having a pal on a pony forum on AOL and it became clear to me after a few weeks that it was not a fellow 8yo pony mad girl. I never told anyone anything and there were no pictures exchanged or anything (wasn’t technologically possible) but definite probing questions etc. I remember about 2 years later ‘internet grooming’ became a buzz word and we had talks on it at school etc and being like oh yeah that’s a thing.
  2. Omegle. Nuff said
  3. fanfiction - I wrote and read it for hours. Some stuff was actually really beautifully written but I definitely read some VERY lewd and sexual stuff aged about 12/13
  4. used to come in from nights out at uni circa 2010/2011 and go on chat roulette and literally cry with laughter with my flatmates , saw SO many unsolicited penises
  5. tumblr. Just the whole place was weird

I still read fanfic as an adult, lmao. But yes, my 11 year old self also read 'lemons' as the smut was called back then.

And Tumblr!!! I spent many an hour of my life wasted on there.

Louise121806 · 20/02/2025 23:20

Pretended to be older than I was in chat rooms 😭. Not internet related but I also remember looking up names and numbers in the phone book and pretending to be from British Gas....asking why they hadn't paid the bill 😲. No idea why. Must have been about 14.

TunipTheVegimal24 · 20/02/2025 23:19

@Ladamesansmerci I'd forgotten about two girls one cup 😂 What even was that?! And the even more horrifying one man one cup 😬

WimbyAce · 20/02/2025 23:18

I remember AOL chat rooms - remember ASL (Age,sex,location) whenever someone new popped up! Mobile phones were just starting up too so I'd get chatting to people on AOL and then move to the mobile. Got myself in q a few scrapes to be honest but luckily nothing bad happened.

Ladamesansmerci · 20/02/2025 23:16

Oh OP 🤣

I'm a 1993 baby, so very much grew up as the internet suddenly became a huge thing.

I saw all the dark shit everyone from my era saw- rotten dot com, beheadings, 2 girls 1 cup, creepy men touching themselves on chat roulette, etc. My parents knew nothing about the internet and at the time couldn't use a computer, so I had completely unfiltered access. It was definitely the days before internet safety.

In terms of weird things I used to do- I'd go on Omegle (a kind of chatroom with people from all over the world) and pretended I was talking to them from jail and that I'd committed crimes ranging from theft to murder 🤣🤷

I was also just a very weird kid who was into classical music/opera and hated all other music, so I spent most of my early teen years talking about Sarah Brightman on the official Sarah Brightman forums, lol. I still have some of the people I met on there on Facebook!!!

As I said, I was weird and nerdy, so also spent a lot of time roleplaying on forums as fictional characters I liked. As in, you'd write a few paragraphs, the next person would continue it, and so on. At least it helped my creative writing skills I guess 😁

My 11 year old self also learned HTML and CSS, alongside paint shop pro, so I could code and create graphics for my Dragon guild on Neopets, so I did gain some useful skills.

TunipTheVegimal24 · 20/02/2025 23:14

Me and my cousin used to go on a chat room, which was supposed to be for teens, but which wasn't monitored. Even at 11, we assumed that most of the other "tweens" were just paedos. Anyway, we used to lure people into a "private chat box", and they would always immediately ask for "cyber sex". We used to start off pretending to do it for real. Stuff like "oooh yeah, I'm getting undressed - I'm wearing a lacy top...". Then start saying more and more stupid and outlandish stuff, pushing to see how much unsexy nonsense they'd put up with, before they gave up and left. Then we used to hound them continuously, saying we were pregnant with a "cyber baby", whenever they appeared in the chat room, asking them about name choices, and whether they were going to pay maintenance 😂😂 Those were the days.

dogpool · 20/02/2025 23:13

Spudthespanner · 20/02/2025 23:06

@dogpool

I did learn a lot about basic HTML and coding during this period of my life and these definitely helped me get into my career more than my degree ever did😅

This is another loss with the way the internet is today. Everything used to be so... home brew. I really miss that.

Completely agree! The hours I would spend on Lissa Explains to code a table just right on my free Geocities page...

pennypop3 · 20/02/2025 23:12

The majority of my social life was conducted via MSN messenger. Then later, MySpace which I still believe was superior to Facebook.

I met a lot of interesting people from all over the country online. A lot of boys who gave me great music recommendations that I'd illegally download on limewire. There was one guy I'd talk to for hours, knew so much about him and vice versa, he seemed really nice. Then my friends were with me one day and basically encouraged me to say really horrible things to him and he blocked me. Still wonder what became of him.

WillimNot · 20/02/2025 23:11

1998, I was at sixth form, had never been near the internet before. Discovered Yahoo chat rooms and ICQ. Hooked. It was in the days where you'd enter a chat and put 17/F/UK to introduce yourself.

Started to chat to a guy regularly who was 18 and lived in Australia. He was gay and unhappy that his entire family had disowned him. I had a difficult home life myself so we used to chat daily, I was bunking half the lessons to make sure I was online.

He was so unhappy he wanted to leave Australia so we concocted this whole idea where he would visit on a visa, marry me, then we would divorce once he had a spousal visa. I would be paid a significant amount for this.

Of course, I had no idea if he was legit and at 17 believed he was. My parents found out about the plan and I was banned from the internet at sixth form. Managed to get back online eventually but he never replied.

I do often wonder if it was a scam. I always tell my two DCs that people they speak to on Discord are not friends and to be cautious and never give your details.

LoveBluey · 20/02/2025 23:07

I used to spend hours on a wedding forum called Hitched. I still remember loads of the user names, people would share so much personal information and photos and there were lots of meet ups. Had forgotten all about it until this thread.

KindLemur · 20/02/2025 23:07

I am a 90s baby so I have a lot of these !
my friends did some crazy shite too

  1. when home internet was first becoming a thing I was 7-8ish. My brother (older) made me an email address and AOL had tons of forums and chat rooms for kids. It’s very obvious now that the early days of internet predators were starting to emerge and decide talking to small kids online was something they could do with no recourse, it just wasn’t ’a thing’ to consider. I remember having a pal on a pony forum on AOL and it became clear to me after a few weeks that it was not a fellow 8yo pony mad girl. I never told anyone anything and there were no pictures exchanged or anything (wasn’t technologically possible) but definite probing questions etc. I remember about 2 years later ‘internet grooming’ became a buzz word and we had talks on it at school etc and being like oh yeah that’s a thing.
  2. Omegle. Nuff said
  3. fanfiction - I wrote and read it for hours. Some stuff was actually really beautifully written but I definitely read some VERY lewd and sexual stuff aged about 12/13
  4. used to come in from nights out at uni circa 2010/2011 and go on chat roulette and literally cry with laughter with my flatmates , saw SO many unsolicited penises
  5. tumblr. Just the whole place was weird
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