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?

😂😂😂

Fucking hell we did the same sort of shit. God almighty we were a lost generation. Digital equivalent of being flung into the wilderness to fend for ourselves. Parents absolutely clueless.

Various odd friendships in my late teens..

One of which was a lad who lived a good 150 miles South West of me, nice enough and we had some good conversations but real life moved on and we stopped talking after a couple of years.

Fast forward a couple more years and I visit his city with my now DP. We're collecting something bought from eBay, its very early and we're on a really busy road.

I spot a lad with headphones on, marching along and thought 'he looks familiar'.. he did a bit of a double take at me but was the other side of the road and kept walking.

I got home to messages from him 'was that you at X at 9am this morning?!.. ' Yep, yes it was! Never been to his city before or since nor did I know where he lived or his route to work. Small small world.

I never invented anything online, I didn't see the point, but I did have a long running feud with a total twat that went on across several forums specific to a particular subject.

I complained that he had taken to copying posts of mine and had been posting them elsewhere, including on his own website as articles he'd written. (He'd done this to other people, including using text from pretty well known books!).

He got drunk one night and went off on a huge diatribe about how I wasn't who I said I was, he was going to come to my house and 'teach me a lesson I'd never forget' and all sorts of other weird accusations and threats. It was really savage, to the point that I woke up to missed calls and messages from multiple people, very worried about me!

This was pre the days of the police taking online attacks seriously, so whilst I made a complaint, it went nowhere.
However he did get banned from several forums in the end, as I knew enough people in real life for everyone to know I was absolutely who I said I was. It damaged his business and he went very quiet for a good few years. He's back around now though doing similar stuff, passing off other peoples work/copy as his own and talking shite, claiming experience he simply hasn't got. I've no doubt he is still an abusive prick with a nasty temper too, but he pretends he has no clue who I am.

Very early 2000s and my friend and I were talking to some bloke on msn. I wasn't getting good vibes off him but she didn't agree. I later found out she had given him my real name and email address. On day one he sent me about 15 emails. I tried blocking him but he'd set another up and carry on spamming me. I had to change my email address in the end.

Me and former friend haven't spoken for years now but this memory still aggravates me.

Internet? My friend and I used to write to the penpals page on Ceefax! Does that count?

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.

Oh there’s another memory unlocked. Those tops with a white arty face on it that where basically a double zipper so you could have it all undone bar the tiny zip in the middle in a low lit rom as the profile pic. Acting adult belly button piercing on show, boobs on show a bit side eyeing the camera. Cool 😎 🤣

We used to do this with the Omegle penises too! So much screaming with laughter, but it was literally every 4 or 5 people on that chat room. I think our parents would’ve been horrified if they’d known!

Christ I'd completely forgotten about fanfic.

Fanfic and livejournal and MySpace.

Back in the day when websites had their own chat forums. If you were a fan of a musician or standup comedian or actor often their website had a chat space.

Now everything is on one of a handful of sites and that's your lot. The internet is so small now.

No internet when I was young and dinosaurs roamed the earth but I vividly remember a girl who I was in the sixth form with making up a boyfriend. I can see her now and remember her name and as a much older person I feel sad for her as she obviously did it to fit in with the other girls. Sadly we were mean to her when we rumbled that he was fictitious. He was never available to meet up after school, to come to parties and none of her stories about how they met added up. I have no idea how her life panned out but I do hope she went on to meet someone who made her happy

When I was about 11 or 12, there was a number you could call on a telephone which would make it ring. (I guess it was used to test that the ring was working?) We used to go into phone boxes, and ring the number then run away and hide to see if any passer-by was amazed that the phone in the box was ringing. Wot larks, eh Pip!

Came out on a message board for fans of a band. Met a girl, fell in love, flew to America solo a year later at 19 to meet her. Didn’t work out in the end due to not being able to be live together but we had a good few years. If gay marriage had been a thing at the time I think life could have been very different. But very happy with how life did turn out.

I can't really remember how it worked it may have been online or it may have been just on the TV. When I was a student I worked Saturday nights in a bookies in one of the roughest parts of Newcastle. Also free tea and coffee so you can imagine the clientele - we had the guy in the tinsel wig, the guy who used to put on dance shows for us, the guy who was in a band (called S'il Vous Plait) who brought us demo tapes, and a guy called 'Killer' but nobody knew why....

Anyway at one point or another we set them all up with lonely hearts profiles - often including the words 'own teeth and bus pass' - never got any interest though! They were aware by the way, but that actually makes me feel worse now as they were clearly vulnerable. Anyway, no harm done.

Spent a lot of time on band forums and then way too much time talking to middle aged married men who I genuinely thought were my friends. Hindsight paints it very differently. I was about 15 when two said men tried to meet me, thankfully I was way too socially awkward to go through with it!

In the mid 90s, on dial up AOL chat rooms, I met a girl who was my age (16/17) but supposedly married to a much older man (he must have been 30s/40s) in Iowa. I lived in the US at the time. We became pen pals of sorts. Like we wrote each other actual letters in the post and she sent me photos of her and her husband, like actual printed at the photo shop at the mall photos.

The conversation was never creepy. We literally talked about normal teen stuff and she talked about bit about being unsure if she wanted to be married to this old dude she was married to. Eventually we lost touch.

I often think back now at what an odd thing this was. Like (a) was this just some guy catfishing me but with proper photos before the days of photoshop? And if so, why? It’s not like we talked about much other than school and friends and teen marriage. 😳 (b) was this an actual child who had been probably forcibly married to this older guy in a conservative religious community? I didn’t really recognise the seriousness of it all at the time and that maybe she was reaching out for help. Also, why did my mum not do anything? As a parent now, I’d be on that and tracking her down (but I am definitely not my mum who probably didn’t give a shit!).

Such an odd situation though. I can still see her in my head and periodically think of her and hope if she was real that she got out before she had too many kids.

The internet is so much smaller now, I agree. Even relatively receb I used to read loads of blogs and now they are all just Instagram accounts and less interesting. There are only a few websites I really use, apart from shops.

Anyway, lots of inappropriate a/s/l as a teenager, but I also met my now husband on the internet as a slightly older teenager about 23 years ago! Much more usual now but we never told people that's how we met as it made us sound like losers at the time.

In 1999 aged 16 was in a chatroom and randomly started talking to this guy from Tulsa Oklahoma who was around the same age.

After a while he starts telling me he is actually Taylor Hanson from the band Hanson. I was a mega fan in 1997 when MMMbop came out to the point of obsession so I couldn't believe my luck.

After about an hour they say nahhhh I'm not really taylor... I am his cousin. And started telling me random facts about the family.

I mean I suppose it's not out of the question...

Was it Ivillage?

Was your name Jen?

Habbo Hotel.

that is all.

Oh what was the penguin one called again.

ClubPenguin

I remember AOL chat rooms well.. A/S/L.. sure there were chat rooms linked to msn messenger also where you could chat to people from your area.. I remember talking to someone and him working out a family member of mine & threatening that he knew who I was :O

Also does anyone remember faceparty? Just remember looking at peoples pictures on there and talking via audio - I think?

also when I was a bit younger I loved neopets - the games were really good - remember one about collecting eggs. Also always went on girland - there were problem pages on there and girls of 13/14 always writing they were pregnant, looking back I think they were making out! You could get stars I think for giving good advice and remember the main person on there was called Lola something, would love to hear more about girland if anyone else remembers 😂
looking back I was always online haha

That’s the one. Oh how we just wasted time and talked to strangers all over the world not a care in the world and nobody checking in on us.

At uni we didn't have Internet access in halls but we did have the FREE number that women could call to talk to lonely "sexy" guys.
While these princes among men paid £5 a minute or whatever to listen to us chat.

All these guys ever got was 14 very drunk girls and boys (18+ uni students) back from the pub talking absolute bollocks at them, while they paid for their expensive wank.

We used to just roar down the phone things like what's your fav flavour of crisps? And most of the dirty aul fuckers still stayed on the line for ages.

Oh my goodness that's a memory recall. We got in trouble messing around on my friends dad's cb radio. We had our own 'handles' too 😂😂😂 He came in one day and we quickly turned it off. He didn't believe we hadn't been messing on it. He touched the set and felt it was still warm and we got in so much trouble 😂😂😂 My aunty and uncle were a lot more laid back. Had some fun times 😂😂😂

No internet when I was growing up. But we used to make crank 999 calls!