REMINISCING OLD AVEN

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

made things confusing. Here were their avatars after the swap:

AVEN eventually became ten years old. We were no longer new anymore—we were becoming mainstream. There were now Asexuality conferences around the world, asexual characters in fiction, medical recognition that asexuality was not a disease or a problem that needed fixing. And we have a lot of other forums for and by asexuals. AVEN continued to grow. I and others in AVEN have more online friends because of it. AVEN seems a bit different now than in the olden days, but it is still my favorite hangout.

We had themes and memes. At times, many of us were characters in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog. We had places in AVEN known as Qqaazzakhstan and Qqaazztralia. Another time, many of us changed our avatars to cheese, and Daleks, and cheesy Daleks.

Did you know that the AVEN forum used to be all purply, with a bit of pink? We also had a thread for transmen and transwomen. Then about ten years ago, Teagan started a thread for nonbinaries and such, called TransWhatevers of AVEN. It quickly grew to the most popular thread. That spawned a TransYada forum of its own.

AVEN didn’t always have a Board of Directors or a Project Team. We used to not have a report button, so Moderators had to stumble onto issues to handle. We used to have just a few threads and categories. These continued to grow. We now have a Gender Forum, a Gray Area, Intersectionality, and other new forums.

We did not always have an asexual flag. But ten years ago (2010), we had a contest for it. We voted on the candidate flags, and the flag that one has been used worldwide ever since.

We have had a lot of fun and adventures through these twenty years. I look forward to the next twenty.