The forum that I was active on was the early 2000s before Myspace and Facebook.

The AOL chat rooms were before that in the 1990s. I did successfully befriend someone my age on there, through the sea of pedophiles. He had a different area code for his phone number, even though we lived relatively close to each other, so it was long distance pricing to call each other, which put a big damper on developing a closer friendship.