I used the internet in the late '70's. It was a friend of mine whose father was some academic sort. Think he was a big wig at...The Museum of National History? Is that a museum? Think that's where he worked... They had a computer in their home. We researched and explored on it, under his supervision. After that, I don't recall using it again until...early...90's. His 23 years is pretty accurate...he might not be remembering with complete accuracy the exact year he was involved in this "study" but he is probably pretty close.
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I am not saying there was no internet long, long ago, or even chat rooms. I remember all you could do was type a response back and forth, and that was the late 1990's.
What I am saying, is that there was no CC, and probably no Christian Forums. The internet was the property of academics and intellectuals for sure. It was incredibly difficult to learn the programming. I actually was on the internet in 1980 at my University. We had to type a long program, and then we had a character limit (an early twitter?) and basically it was more trouble than it was work. Or maybe that was an intranet?
Point being, the OP was not posting in Christian Forums 23 years ago. I hope he was just using a hyperbole!
I got my first computer in early 2000, and there were message boards then, but I did not really use my computer for that, though the internet was of course the big draw with all its offerings... by 2007, oh my goodness that is ten years ago now, I was a young Christian and started doing apologetics, speaking to non-believers of various stripes, wow, what an initiation! On a site that was secular with very little moderation, profanity was par for the course from them. There seemed to be no length they would not go to try to get Christians to leave. Maybe it was the internet that God did not create? Hahahahahahaha. 
Average people, who could afford a computer, began using the internet in earnest....'93, '94. It's true that windows '95 made things easier, but I just don't understand why anyone would suspect this guys story because of, at most, a one or two year discrepancy? A study could very well have been done on the internet in '93 or '94, but even if it was '95, I don't see where the suspicion comes in...and there were personal computers sold and chat rooms being used in the late 80's. It's feasible that a study could have been done on the internet in the late 80's in chatrooms...but never mind, sheesh!
I got my first computer in early 2000, and there were message boards then, but I did not really use my computer for that, though the internet was of course the big draw with all its offerings... by 2007, oh my goodness that is ten years ago now, I was a young Christian and started doing apologetics, speaking to non-believers of various stripes, wow, what an initiation! On a site that was secular with very little moderation, profanity was par for the course from them. There seemed to be no length they would not go to try to get Christians to leave. Maybe it was the internet that God did not create? Hahahahahahaha.
I remember buying a PC - a 286. My husband slapped a menu on it, and there we went. Well, not for a while, although it did have some good games on it!
We paid over $2000 for that computer, one of the biggest purchases we ever made, besides our house. But, I still don't see chat rooms, with people fighting and posting opinions till the early 2000's. Of course, we are pretty primitive in Canada. And electricity was so hard to run to igloos, let alone internet! LOL
Maybe 30 or 31 years ago, I had an Atari 130XE computer, which was an Atari 800 with a little more memory. I got a 300 baud modem. So in the mid to late 1990's, I would go on BBS's, dedicated computers that individuals would set up in their homes. You called in and you could join discussions and upload and download files. There was a network called FIDONet that had a network of BBSs around the country. I participated in some Bible discussions in 1988 or 1989, surely by 1989 on FIDONet.
You could participate in forums and discuss issues much like the discussions we are having now without the graphics. Most people had 1200 baud or 2400 baud modems in the late 1990s. I could almost read the text as fast as the 300 baud modem would spit it out on the screen.
Then, I was on Usenet groups in the early 1990's. There were usenet forums and listservers, I think they called them. That's where you received forum posts by email and responded by email. There were some online forums in the late 1990's, and listservers died down after web forums became a thing. I co-moderated a list and the guy who handled the tech side of things wanted to shift it all over to the web. It never really happened. For the most part, the list just died out and most people did not move to the web.
I tried the web back in the Netscape days in the early 1990's, but I don't remember if there were Bible discussion forums. There were some forums on the world wide web in the late 1990's, but it seemed to start to pick up steam some time after 2000.
You could participate in forums and discuss issues much like the discussions we are having now without the graphics. Most people had 1200 baud or 2400 baud modems in the late 1990s. I could almost read the text as fast as the 300 baud modem would spit it out on the screen.
Then, I was on Usenet groups in the early 1990's. There were usenet forums and listservers, I think they called them. That's where you received forum posts by email and responded by email. There were some online forums in the late 1990's, and listservers died down after web forums became a thing. I co-moderated a list and the guy who handled the tech side of things wanted to shift it all over to the web. It never really happened. For the most part, the list just died out and most people did not move to the web.
I tried the web back in the Netscape days in the early 1990's, but I don't remember if there were Bible discussion forums. There were some forums on the world wide web in the late 1990's, but it seemed to start to pick up steam some time after 2000.