Finally uploaded a profile picture that actually fits my name here from the AP days. I probably started lurking since 2006/2007 and joined by 2008 if I had to guess... big day.
Do you still need to pay Jason $3 or whatever to change your username? Did that more than once on APnet hahah
Oh wow, this is bringing back major feelings of nostalgia for me as well. I think I joined sometime in HS (so between 2000 - 2004), and probably racked up 30k+ posts by the end of it. Username was AShannon04, I wanna say? I still maintain that message boards are the best format for communities on the web, Discord be damned.
This was the AbsolutePeak of AbsolutePunk imo. My first ever experience with forums as a teen, it was my homepage and everything. Of all my friends, I was the only one who got into it, I was proper addicted - and yet they they all wondered why I always had "such a good taste in music" and would ask me for recs hahahaha. Had 1,000s of posts in this era. I'm in Australia and I still have friends on FB from America etc. from this exact period of time. Absolute nostalgia overload.