[Fr0styMatt88]

Certainly, but at the same time -- it wasn't a free-for-all. I was lucky that I'd been taught to be suspicious and to have boundaries long before the Internet. Of course that doesn't preclude anything from happening and luck does play a part. It just means I wouldn't have engaged in some risky behaviours - I wouldn't go giving strangers my phone number (this was before mobiles, so my phone number was my parent's phone number) or home address, for example. This was at a time when people hadn't even warmed up to the idea of using their credit cards online; my folks using their credit card to pay the monthly Internet bill was a way out-there thing at the time.

I also wasn't _that_ young - I don't think I touched IRC until I was around 15 or 16.

I remember the first in-real-life 'meetup' was a big thing; it was with members of an IRC chat group from our local area. I was real-life friends with some of the people already, so it wasn't an entire group of strangers. I don't think that even happened until I was out of high school.