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

[Username73638]

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?

oh wow small world!

@DonningMyHardHat

Also I have a handful of friends who I met through a self-harm recovery forum at 15/16.

Recoveryourlife forum?
That site may have quietly saved my life.

I used to drink most nights and send nudes. I was just looking for validation that I was pretty because I had body dysmorphia. My home life was happy but with undiagnosed ADHD I literally hated my appearance, I mean I thought i was disgusting. I would never have gotten naked irl. Even now I struggle with that and I'm married 10 years.

I still cringe when I think there could be pictures out there. Thankfully I never showed my face. I feel really sad for that girl.

Rotten.com for me too. Many of those images are burned into my brain. I don't know how I used to be able to stomach that stuff. I couldn't now.

Prior to the internet days, my friends and I used to phone up the operator and ask to be put through to our "cousin" whose phone number we had lost. We had many famous cousins. 😅 It never worked.

Netmums? I remember tickers on there and the website was quite pink from memory. Lots of fakes on it but also lots of very real people too.

Me and my friend used to 'hack' various ex boyfriends' MSN accounts. I don't think we did anything too sinister. I rember changing the status of my ex boyfriends to 'by the way everyone I'm now gay'. We were so mature 🙄

Oh and not online related, but we used to go into phone boxes and prank call random 0800 numbers. Fun times

My teen cringe internet story (ok 20yo at the time, not quite teen)

I worked for a popular cable company at the time on their customer service desk. A few months in I felt I knew more than enough to be helpful on random internet forums so I'd try and help folk on there who were grumbling about the company.
I was sure I was being really helpful and got into some pretty big debates with people online about all things to do with said cable company. I also happily informed anyone who'd listen that I worked for the company so I knew best. Anyway it all came to a messy end. A guy I worked with started randomly saying terms or phrases I knew I'd used on the forums. He started throwing my username into conversations in work and would watch me to see if I reacted.
Next thing I knew I was asked to come into meeting with the call centre manager and someone from high up in the company. They confronted me with my posts from the forums and said they knew it was me based on the posts all being from times I wasn't in work- and basically told me I was being unprofessional and being a bad example (which was fair tbh). They said they could track the IP address if I refused to confess- still no idea if they actually could.
You'd think it would end there but no! I instantly invented a younger sibling who I insisted must have been pretending to be me and promised the boss that I'd have a word with said sibling! They clearly knew I was talking nonsense but kindly humoured me I left very soon after and never told anyone any of this until now. It still makes me cringe over twenty years later.

We had no Internet when I was a teenager. I do remember winning a child's cook book from Look In nafazkbe and £5 from the crossword competition in Blue Jeans magazine. Both magazines published my real name & address in the list of winners!

Fucking hell. I've only just realised I've been on the internet for 21 years. Shit, I feel old. I was already married before then. So, no teenage misadventures for me.

So many memories unlocked. The human race discovers the Internet and before you know it men use it for sending cock pics. Weirdos.

Teenager in the mid ‘00s. I actuallly get scared thinking back to what I got up to online in that time. I spent hours and hours on Habbo Hotel, late into the night. And spent so much money on Habbo coins - my Dad paid my phone bill and you used to be able to just text a number and then you’d be billed for the coins in your phone bill, no idea why my Dad kept paying it!

I had a long term Habbo boyfriend. I never knew his real name but it felt so real - we’d have “cyber sex” and chat for hours. One day he just disappeared, I was absolutely heartbroken.

I also used to give out my email address, chat to random boys on MSN who all were apparently my own age but looking back were probably paedophiles and go on webcam in underwear. Strangely, non of them ever wanted to show their faces in camera!

Once my email address got hacked - someone asked me the name of my pet which was my secret answer on my email account, I obviously told them as seemed so innocent and then lost access my email address. Not really sure what the point of hacking a 13 year olds email was but it terrified me and I was a lot more cautious after that so probably a good thing in the end!

Oh Yes!! Me too!😂

Yes! I've never told anyone this but at one point I pretended to be a vampire 😆 I was in some sort of chatroom or forum related to vampires and I got talking to a bloke who wanted to find a vampire to 'turn' him. We used to message back and forth all the time, and he'd listen to my backstory of how I became a vampire (having been attacked one night by an old vampire on my way home haha). I don't know if he genuinely believed me or if he was just enjoying the pretence like I was, but eventually we just naturally dropped it and started talking about normal life. Eventually he got a girlfriend and his messages tapered off to nothing. So cringeyworthy looking back but I was a bit of an odd teen!

I remember begging my mum and dad for the internet when I was 17 so I could email my friends. Only 2 of my friends had the internet then and we all had email addresses that were for the whole family.

The thing about the internet back then is that it was new to everyone and kids were learning faster than adults. The 6th form boys would be looking up porn on the school computers and some of the year 9's created an alternative school website with reviews of all the teachers and a school map with suggestions of the best places to have a fag without being caught. The teachers were all furious (except for one of the English teachers who had been given a much nicer review than everyone else) but it took weeks before the IT teacher worked out how to take it down.

oh my goodness this thread is taking me back! The Wild West of the internet in the early 00s was my education. We had literally zero supervision and our parents had NOOOO idea what we were up to. We started off with Neopets and spiralled out of control from there - MSN/AOL forums, livejournal, limewire, tumblr. We used to have sleepovers and spend all night taunting perverts on chat roulette.

I was also a secret massive nerd and joined all the Lord of the Rings forums and read all the fanfics! I still have some people from my early internet days as Facebook friends. There are others I still think about occasionally and wonder what became of them.

I think the ‘worst’ thing I did was strike up a friendship with a boy allegedly my own age from a rock/punk band forum. I sent him pictures of myself and I was only 14 😬 we talked for hours on the actual phone and via text when we weren’t online, eventually I broke it off and I remember him ringing me repeatedly whilst I was on a family holiday begging me to continue our ‘relationship’ 😂

I also remember chatting to “Tom Felton” aka Draco Malloy from the Harry Potter films on MSN messenger. It blatantly wasn’t him but a bunch of girls from school were convinced it was and it caused all sorts of young teenage girl drama!

There was no 'online' when I was a teenager!!

Was it Bounty OP? I do wonder if that's still going?!

No! Really?! Do tell us more...

Oh gosh. I can remember a website that me and my friends spent a lot of time on. It was called something like Dollz? I can’t remember exactly. But you’d have a little image of a girl in her underwear and you’d have to drag and drop clothes onto her. There was hundreds of options of outfits to choose from and the page would take forever to load on dial up connection because of how many images there were on the page

I also remember spending a lot of time reading fanfiction and remember a particular one I spent a lot of time reading as it had multiple chapters - it was practically a whole book. But Malfoys son and Rose Weasley had an accidental teen pregnancy and an on/off again romance

I was a teenager in the late 80s / early nineties, so my equivalent to all this was to buy a fanzine about a band I liked, which had a page of messages from people wanting to meet other fans in their area. You could write a letter to them via the fanzine, and swap phone numbers. I met up with some of them in town, and it felt very exciting meeting strangers that way. I was pretty lucky they all turned out to be genuine. It was a more innocent time.

We used to go to the community library in town and go on the websites for things like Eastenders and Pop Idol and print off random pictures whilst thinking it was hilarious. I remember my friend printed off loads of pictures of Rik Waller and left them lying around the library.

Why do people bother posting if they are too old to relate? I think the OP, and well, everyone, is aware that not everyone had access to the Net growing up. I would just read what's here, or move on. I don't see the point of endless replies of 'no, I had no Internet..'

In 2003 I was groomed as a young teen (reading through this thread I don't feel at all alone now!) by my friend's next-door neighbour. My friend had been messaging him too. He told me he was a teen too. It's a bit of a blur now but I've no idea if my friend knew it was her creepy neighbor or what! After I found out who he really was I went on webcam to him with another friend and showed him my legs in my short skirt😐 It was my way of showing I wasn't bothered who he was (I was obviously embarrassed and was really!)

When I was a teenager our school had a computer room and you got to use MICROSOFT WORD. It was all very exciting.
Used to play Lemmings, Rainbow Islands etc on my old Amiga 500

Best I can do sorry 🤣