upvote
I ran a message board for a little bit back in 1997 but I didn’t really moderate it and just left it alone. I came back months later and it had somehow become a strange two-topic forum. I assume because somebody had randomly posted about each, a search engine had indexed it and more people searching for each of those topics found it.

It was pretty funny seeing the threads where the two groups talked past each other, confused what the other was talking about.

The first topic was “AOL PUnterz” which as far as I could understand were programs/scripts that could maybe crash somebody else’s aol connection and disconnect them? A pretty leet thing to do I guess when you got in an aol argument.

The other topic was Hanson and their hit song mmmbop.

reply
Back in the days you could summon and culture them by posting seed spam. In one test 200 worked ~4 times as well as 50.
reply
Failure to configure their website for a sci fi future or to not adapt to this issue are not strong enough lapses to not empathize. He cared enough to try and get rid of the spam and keep the forum in a quality condition. He didn’t give up or step away.
reply
>[...] and thought, this is hilarious, I'm going to prison.

I've only had one moment like this related to a site I was a moderator for back in the 00's. It's genuinely one of the most fascinating feelings, and the one experience I can attribute most of my bad choices as an adult to.

Just laughing as the white hot panic starts to grow and the adrenaline just dumps into your brain.

Legitimately, I spent years chasing that feeling again through various means (drugs, hobbies, skydiving, etc.)

reply
Could you describe anything about they experience?
reply
Sorry but no, it would be possibly obvious which it was, and that username is tied to my real life name too clearly.

Summary: our message board was being used to coordinate csam, both the creation and consumption thereof. At first we just edited the posts to point to gore and other shit like that thinking it was just perverts sharing links. But then we realized there were times, dates, addresses/coordinates also being shared, hidden in the board in a way we didn't expect. The site owner immediately turned all information over to law enforcement and nuked the site entirely.

reply
I believe there are video games that take the same approach with cheaters.
reply
Jesus. What an experience. What percentage of your time did it take moderating this absurd shadow board??!
reply
Also known as hell banning[1].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22322049

reply