REMINISCING OLD AVEN BY KELLY AVEN is twenty years old! It has grown so much in that time. I found AVEN perhaps the same way many others did—by surfing the ‘net and stumbling on a forum about asexuality. Way cool, I thought. I lurked for a while and finally joined in May 2005. I was the 4052nd member. That was huge! It had over four thousand members then. AVEN has over 130,000 members now. Then, as now, just a small fraction of AVEN’s membership were active members. And the active members knew each other. We had threads for “The Person Above Me”, where someone would post a fact about the poster above them, and then someone would post a fact about them. That is because we really did know each other, even if we never met. But we did have meetups. Since there seemed to be few enough of us around, we would travel and meet each other. I ended up traveling to New York, Las Vegas, Cape Cod, Argentina, Europe, Asia, Australia, and other places to meet other AVENites. We now have a huge section of the forum dedicated to meetups. I became part of the team in 2006 after winning a Moderator election. Soon after, I was a temporary Administrator, because there was a repeat of the 20/20 episode where several AVEN members were on TV discussing being ace. At the time, it was a novel idea. The rerun of the show boosted our membership, and we needed all hands on deck to handle the new members. I became a permanent Admin soon after. But much of that work went to deleting spam accounts that would join each night by the dozens. Coleslaw eventually updated the software to block the spam accounts. When a member reached 1,000 posts, they would be in the Atrix. It was just a label, but we had stories of the underground maze, the Minotaur that lived there, and the snack bar hidden somewhere in the Atrix. With 500 more posts, one would finally get out of the Atrix. Not everyone made it. One memorable incident that occurred early in the AVENverse that would probably not be allowed today was that two popular members—Jesh (the bunny) and ghosts—swapped names. That
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