I first joined the forums on April 20th, 2012, and I started playing probably the next day or a few days later. I honestly cannot precisely recall why I made my forums account before playing. I think I joined the forums before playing in-game because I saw that they didn't have any servers for Canadians, and I thought you could only join servers that you lived in. I thought I couldn't play because I didn't live in the U.S.A., which is why the first thing I posted was a thread asking for them to open Canadian servers.
http://www.minecraftsurvivalgames.com/threads/canadians.392/
Of course, they explained to me that you could join any server, which I was happy to hear. There are also some classic forumers/old timers if you could spot them (Chad also responded which was pretty cool
). I also thought the U.S. servers were hosted in New York because that's pretty much the closest big city to where I live in Canada. I was so ignorant back in the day
I'd also consider myself to be the luckiest forumer; I just happened to join the forums on the 4/20 blaze it, and I just happened to be the #YoloSwag1337th member. I didn't realize how much of a coincidence this was until much later on when I started learning the strange internet jargon I pretty much know fluently today xD