Prior to the internet condensing into just 5 or so websites, what do you remember fondling about being online?
I remember winning a raffle contest on the old Terraria forums and getting to pick my own title (instead of just New Member, Member, Well-Known Member). Of course, since I was like 13, I picked a random collection of letters that only I knew was an acronym of my signature on said forums.
Omg forum signatures.
I remember on one forum I visited, people would do these “scavenger hunt”/puzzle things, where they would encode some sort of clue in an image in their signature. Like in the corner of the blue background, there’s a grid of pixels of slightly different shades of blue, and if you treat the lighter blues as 1s and the darker as 0s, and decode it as ASCII, it’ll give you a URL to another image, which has another clue, this time a math puzzle, etc…The first person to “solve” the signature would DM the answer, and they would edit the signature with a leaderboard of usernames who solved it.
And people would get crazy creative with it! It was a lot of fun.
That sounds like a blast! I had so much fun making my own signature and exploring what people had done with theirs.