from around 2008 until 2011, my best friend and i ran the most popular discussion forum on Shelfari. technically, we ran it until the site was eaten by Amazon in 2016, but we weren't active after our freshman year of college.
i really wish i had saved all the old posts and chat logs from those days. i think it's neat that as an extremely sheltered and not at ALL online savvy homeschooled loser, i was able to make something seen/used by thousands of people every day. and i also think it is fucking hilarious it will probably be my life's most impactful achievement. i would kill for a record of it. it was all extremely cringe and embarrassing, of course, since i was a homeschooled tween/teen.
another reason i wish i had made some kind of archive is because, in hindsight, i'm pretty certain one of the members was being groomed. i would love to be wrong, but i have no way to confirm. i don't even remember her old username at this point, so i have nothing to go on to try and track her down.
for context, my friend and i had parents who heavily monitored our internet usage while simultaneously having no idea how the internet worked. so they kept us off social media (where The Devil was) but we constantly played all these online dress up games and found ways to make accounts and chat with other users on there. specifically, there was a website called DollsDivine where we befriended two other homeschoolers our age, twin sisters from (iirc) Alabama. they had a similar situation in their homes and told us about Shelfari. our parents didn't clock the social aspect of Shelfari (it's just a website for books!) and we migrated there.
the forum started out as just the four of us either talking about books or doing Protestant vs. Catholic debates (the twins were Southern Baptist). i bet those conversations would be hilarious now. we Skype called them a few times, and they were very sweet horse girls who didn't deserve us doing mini online Inquisitions at them every day. i hope they are well.
after a few weeks, we got our fifth user. she was a very cool and edgy alt teen who liked Depeche mode, did a lot of vampire RP, and went to ~public school~. she became our token atheist, so the debates really started heating up. it was wild because we would be so nasty in the religion threads, but then be talking to each other at the same time in other threads like nothing was going on. i gotta wonder if the spectacle of it all is what sparked our popularity.
(it wasn't. what made us popular is that we were a general discussion forum with a mod team of four homeschooled teens from conservative families who only deleted users/posts if they were obviously sexual in nature (because of Jesus), and we were all in the same time zone so "Mods Asleep" was in effect after 10pm, until whenever our parents let us on the family computer the next day. it was a madhouse.)
eventually, we got our 6th user, a british man in his late twenties. i honestly don't know how he found us, but it didn't flag as weird at the time because he adapted to our posting culture pretty well. (like i said, hindsight) he was our second atheist and always took the vampire girl's side in debates, would compliment her on her arguments/reasoning, and they often talked about books one-on-one.
the thing is, since we were fairly lax moderators, even after the floodgates opened and thousands of people were on there every day, most of them didn't really know the mod team. they were doing their own thing. but this guy knew. he was on the forum when the only users were 5 teen girls, and after the forum got big, he kept only interacting with us. eventually, he petered out to only really interacting with vampire girl. i remember references they would make to private conversations and Skype calls, and i think he joined one of her RP forums. i know for a fact that i had several private conversations with him about a variety of topics, and i would be curious to look at them through an adult lense to see if there were red flags my oblivious ass didn't catch.
idk what the point of this was. if you're out there, vampire girl from Shelfari, i hope you are thriving and that you didn't get groomed on my badly moderated forum. and if you did i hope you get revenge.
