Member-only story
Humor from the Bowels of the Internet
Champagne + Strawberries = Vindication
Or, Have You Hugged a Forum Moderator Today?
Originally published about two decades ago, but still just as true today, if not moreso. “Living well is the best revenge.”
From 1988 until 1994, I was a SysOp (old-fashioned term for “Moderator”) on Genie. Most of you are too young, or too new to high tech even to remember Genie, but for a while there it was a hot competitor of CompuServe, back before there was such a thing as Prodigy or AOL or Earthlink, and long before the days of DSL. (I won’t bore you with those old sob stories about how we chatted on an ASCII text based system at 300 baud and thought it was blazingly fast, or how in the early days of “chat” on CompuServe, it was called “CB” to make clear the similarity to Citizen’s Band Radio, which had been all the rage not so very long before that…)
I was a Senior Assistant in the Writers’ Ink RoundTable. This was an unpaid and thankless job, much like I assume being a moderator anywhere is, and mostly a labor of love and addiction. I had assistants reporting to me, and I assure you they were paid every bit as well as I.
For the most part, we had a blast interacting with the members of the RoundTable (or “RT” as I shall call it…
