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?

Why are so many people posting this? If you don't relate to the thread then don't bloody post on it. Christ almighty.

Making up for lost opportunities to do strange things online as a teen by doing them now?

I suppose my most youthful 'online' experience was a pre-WWW network while a postgrad student - played Mornington Crescent in about 1983!

Omg you have taken me back!!!! I used to listen to late night love all the time 😂😂

Very early 00s I found a Yahoo club dedicated to a TV show I absolutely loved at the time. For some reason I decided to set up a profile pretending to be one of the actors. It was supposed to be totally harmless and I was completely daft and overboard with it all. Most people there knew it wasn't real but a couple really believed it and we're so full on I quickly disappeared.

I also had a profile as me and would chat to some of the club members about the fake actor. I made good friends with a couple. Not sure if they ever realised I was both profiles but I still think of them quite often to this day!

I've never done anything like it since. The internet was such a novelty at the time I think all sensible thought went out of the window!

I was born in 1992 so can obviously relate to pretty much everything that has already been mentioned.

Does anyone else remember gurl.com? The message boards there were basically a hotbed of paedophiles grooming tweens/teens into talking about sex and masturbation, combined with a lot of teen pregnancy and marriage stuff that was mostly made up. I was kind of obsessed with the ‘real’ teen pregnancy members though. There was a core group of members who had blogs etc., some of whom I still follow on social media 15-20 years later!

Also I have a handful of friends who I met through a self-harm recovery forum at 15/16. In retrospect it’s insane that emotionally unstable teenagers and young adults were being encouraged to get together in groups without any kind of supervision. I never told my parents what I was doing or how I knew these people. I could have been meeting up with anyone. It would have been so easy for someone to pray on vulnerable young women (and pretty much all of us have since been diagnosed as neurodivergent).

Oh, I almost forgot the time I signed into MSN messenger and I got several IMs from people asking how I was online. I had no idea what they were talking about. It turned out there’d been a huge blackout in NYC (2003). I panicked so started typing something then switched off my computer at the socket mid sentence.

We didn't have the internet; we had a dumb terminal linked via telephone wires to the Big Computer in Barnet. My mate Janet found out a way to get it to spit out horoscopes.

Also I have a handful of friends who I met through a self-harm recovery forum at 15/16. In retrospect it’s insane that emotionally unstable teenagers and young adults were being encouraged to get together in groups without any kind of supervision.@DonningMyHardHat

I was a member of a secret eating disorder community where everyone was on stackers and gave advice on how to stay thin. There was a section called Thinspo or something like that where people posted pictures of dangerously underweight women and artwork of sexualised skeletons. I didn’t have an eating disorder myself but an online friend invited me and I wanted to be part of her world.

I used to go on random lesbian chat rooms and start chats with "make me cum" then masturbate to them 😬

not a teen but use to go on aol chat alot pretended i was someone else just for a laugh sometimes- so many friens made also met my husband-confessed my real name before we met
anyone remember the pub chat room

I LOVED an AOL chat room. There were some that were known for more 'sexy talk' - I think 'Beach Party' was one of the rooms. And something to do with an elevator....

I would spend ridiculous amounts of time in them at work because the internet was always 'on' whereas at home, I would have to unplug the phone and dial up and always had my parents tapping their imaginary wrist watches at me.

I really vividly recall chatting with someone who was called FloridaBeachBum (fuck knows how I remember that) in a room every day for about a week, before he declared that he loved me. I then got a message on ICQ (remember that?) from a girl in New Orleans to warn me that he had told her he loved her the week before. Me and girl from NO "called him out" 🙄 in the chat room thinking we were doing a big 'reveal' and everyone gave literally zero fucks. I then started chatting regularly with the girl from New Orleans - she lived rurally on a bayou and her life was so different from mine - we would chat on ICQ or in one of the AOL private rooms (maybe that was the elevator bit?) Anyway - me at night, her first thing in the morning - about our lives/our day etc. This went on for about a year including sending photos in the post of us and our pets and talking about the boys we liked. Looking back it seems weird, but actually it was quite sweet - like having an old fashioned pen-pal. I sometimes wonder about her.

LIke this... (not sure if pictures are uploadable at the moment?) but if they are...

There are some core memories here!

Head of IT (we only had 1 IT teacher 😅) was so inept that a a bunch of non- tech savvy 14 year old girls could get round the firewall and onto the internet. Never got caught.

Chat rooms galore. Would email and chat to this one guy for hours on end. He was in his late 20’s in NZ. Clearly grooming.

How did we all survive?

Online as a teenager?
Blimey.
There weren't even mobile phones til I was over 25

Jesus I just remembered when I was 18 and this was v early 2000s chatting with a guy for weeks and FLYING to meet him in London (he paid) when I got there he looked nothing like his pic, he was my age but wasn't the pic he sent. But we still hung out anyway. He could have murdered me! We stayed friends for a while after till I blocked him 😂

@fashionqueen0123 I used to listen to Jeremy Kyle too, think he called himself Jezza though! Think it was called the 'Late night love affair?'

Started a roleplaying community in which about ten other girls around 16-22 wrote journal entries as gay Edwardian men. 😂

I became a teenager in 1979.

My sister and I met an older boy from a different school on the way home once and he tagged along back to ours. He was quite annoying and we deduced that he wasn't the brightest spark!

My sister and I were quite awful and showed him a patch of ground where we got a bottle of something from the tack room and put it in a watering can and watered the ground and told him that tomorrow there would be fully grown vegetables as the stuff we used was a special quick growing formula.

The next day he followed us from school again and we showed him the earth which we had carefully planted fully grown carrots that morning!

He was so impressed he gave us a £5 note and we poured some of the 'magic' quick growing stuff into a bottle and gave it to him to take home!

Weirdly, we never saw him again!

Mid 2000s...I had a completely fake persona on a popular hip-hop forum that I kept up for years. I can still recall many of the other regular posters usernames etc. Definitely was a form of escapism for me.

Pro Ana websites - so weird. Thin commandments, 'Thinspiration', 'What did you eat today' threads, 'guess how much I weigh' threads with young people in their underwear, 'Accountability' threads to be as eating disordered as possible. Self harm picture threads. Endless tips and tricks threads. The most horrendous environment for mentally ill teenagers but also a great community. I went on several meet ups. Not healthy ones but they were fun!

The worst of them them was called PASS - Pro Ana Suicide Society! But I was on several.

Also - Live Journal. Wtf was that - keeping your private diary online for strangers (and worse - friends!) to read. Eek, I want to die just thinking about it.

Talking to people in the next room to me on msn messenger.

That sounds pretty harmless to me, you didn't cause trouble or insult anyone. It was good fun! There was no internet when I was a child and teenager but I used to make up different identities for, and stories about, myself - far away from home of course. It was escapism. Some of them were quite good! You were extremely clever aged 12-13 to fake such a convincing id.

There is plenty of that on facebook; for some it's a way of being really private, they cannot be identified but of course there are loads of scammers which is awful. However you were no scammer, just fantasising.

Was it Essential Baby @Username73638?

To do anything at all online as a teenager I would have had to time-travel about 20 years!

I used to listen to exactly the same thing with headphones so that my parents couldn’t hear it. I think all my sex and relationship knowledge is thanks to that radio show.

We used to ring the operator on 100 and ask to speak to Busby. I cringe now.

lol I met my DH in an AOL chat room. Quizzers! Married nearly 21 years now.