I have been a wrestling fan since 5 years old and far as a I remember I never believed it was real as my dad let me know from the top it was all just entertainment. The first time I started reading the WON was in 1989 at the Center Stage tapings where the Atlanta Boys (Scott Hudson, Steve Prazak, Jon Horton, Gary Yarman, et al) would pass it around the area where we were seated at so yeah there were a lot of smart fans hanging around the ATL scene at that time. Those guys also put out their own newsletter the Shennomake Press which was a parody version of the WON that was very popular locally. Now were there a lot of fans that believed it was real.....yes but it wasn't as big as you would think especially in the South.
I started going online in 1995 going back to Ryder & Scherer and the Prodigy chat rooms and I read RSPW and all of it's spawns but never really started to participate until the birth of the Wrestling Classics message board in 1999 then DVDVR right after that as Gancarski recruited me there although I was reading Dean and the others stuff from the beginning. I also posted on tOA some because it felt like the Wrestling Classics of Japanese wrestling in a lot of ways.
And don't think that places like Wrestlezone is anything groundbreaking as you had Lords of Pain, Wrestling Inc., and many other sites that jacked Dave's news way before he himself even got online.
The niches dominated that era as you had packs of people that specialized in one form or the other but everyone was still able to speak knowledgeably on the other stuff as well and then you also had the various wrestling reviewing groups like DVDVR, Workrate Cru, Shoot Angle, so on and so forth that would goad each other making some highly entertaining reads. Then you also had the chat rooms and the like which also helped make the scene feel different than now as you would have people hanging around chatting for hours on end every night.
This particular board right here features the most of us "old-timers" than any other board except Wrestling Classics there is today and the only reason Classics has more is because it focuses on Classics mostly.