ALT DISCUSS WRESTLING E-FEDS:

It was one of the biggest movements in eWrestling history. It was my first official large-scale contribution to the game. It was along time before RoughKut.com was born and in fact, it was back when I was an active eWrerstler so you know that's ancient history. 

WebTV was the thorn is computer users asses for the first couple of years after it came on the market back in 1997-1998. Even though I was already keen to AOL, WebTV was the first access to the Internet that was "my own". I owned a WebTV and with WebTV was a very large population of eWrestlers. There was even a small infestation of "WebTV Feds" and trust me, they were all horrible. I digress...

WebTV has it's own personal method of approving Usenet- ALT.DICUSS newsgroups. ALT.DISCUSS was WebTV's own "section" of Usenet so that you know- NEWS:ALT.DICUSS addresses were strictly for WebTV users firewalled to computer users even though WebTV could visit any newsgroup it wanted.

Since WebTV had it's own private newsgroups, they came up with a rather stupid method to approve new groups. They had a voting forum to which you propose the new group and for days or weeks or months in some cases, you had to get as many random people to vote "YES" or "NO" on the approval of your group. It became a fucking political hell-hole filled with "YES" groups and "NO groups of gangs of people who didn't care about the group to be nominated. They just decided whether to vote yes or no at whim. So if you pissed the "NO" group off, they would send your link to all it's members to kill it. If you got in good with the "YES" group, they would all vote yes to get you over.

Yes it was as stupid as it sounds.

There was no WebTV group for eFeds and I decided to propose one. So the name ADWE-F was given the "go" and I had to gather about 300 yes votes because some jackass put me on the "NO" list and they had about 200 members so I had to get the "YES" group and a lot of other people on my side. In order to "win" you had to win by 50 votes or something like that. So my fight was endless for about two weeks I think. I had to get people to get people to get people to vote and finally at about 1:00 am I was reloading the hell out of my screen to see what the final verdict was.

Finally, the ballots were in for all the proposed groups. I won by maybe one vote.

It was a pretty fun place to be for a while. Discussions, flame wars, roleplaying, etc. A dream come true.

But my then girlfriend was pregnant with my child and I couldn't be the cheerleader much longer because I was moving from California back home to Detroit. As my presence in the group dwindled, so did everyone elses. Soon all that was left were advertisments for new eFeds and I left the group alone for good.

I went back months later and the group was gone. Dead. It kind of bothered me a little. So I still keep it's link here which is now the column you are reading.

R.I.P ADWE-F.