The return of my virtual family

I may have mentioned in recent blogs about a forum called RantRave, if not I'll bring you up to speed.

It's late 2004 and I'm talking to my friend Jodi (I wonder if how many blogs I've written where I've not actually mentioned her, but she is actually pretty pivotal to this story). At this point we were friends that didn't really talk that often, infact exceedingly rarely, but we're having a catch up and she mentions that she's joined this forum called RantRave, a forum where you can just talk about whatever you wanted and she invited me to join.

At this point during my life I was actually quite likeable. I kept opinions to myself and even then to be fair, I didn't even have controversial views. It was a good time to know me :P.

But anyway, so there I am on this forum. It's an interesting mix of people from all around the world. There were my fellow Brits, as well as Americans, Canadians, Australians and so on. Eventually I get really comfortable and I start to share stuff that I rarely share with anyone. They had become my family. It was quite bizarre, feeling like this group of about 70 individuals was like a family, but I felt comfortable there and it gave me the foundations to be able to start expressing my opinions.

It didn't last long though, within a year everything had gone sour on the board (not for me personally, just in general) and eventually it closed down. I felt like I had lost an important part of my life. I joined several other message boards afterwards that were of a similar nature that had been set up by former members of RantRave, they even had various members of RantRave on them, but it was never quite the same.

So that was 6 years ago and although I keep in contact with a few of them, I haven't from most of them for several years, however, that has now started changing. In the past few days I have started receiving friend requests on Facebook from the old members of RantRave, infact out of the contacts on the Facebook account I'm using at the moment, exactly half are old RantRave users.

Is this the beginning of the return of my virtual family? I hope so. It was the happiest time of me life and would love for those days to return.