Empire of Meow

The One True History of MEOW!

The Meow Wars The largest flame war in Usenet history, involving hundreds of people from over 80 newsgroups, lasting over forty-five weeks. It was the Usenet equivalent of World War II. It was The Flamewar to End All Flamewars.

It was the best of times. The Meow Wars It all began innocently enough: a small group of students at Harvard University - a band of future bloodsucking ambulance-chasing lawyers, medical specialists who phone in diagnoses from mobile phones on yachts, and caffeine-crazed computer programmers with way too much time on their hands - began to use Usenet as a local dorm room bulletin board/gossip clique area.

The newsgroup they chose, apparently at random from among the hundreds of empty Usenet joke-newsgroup wastelands: alt.fan.karl-malden.nose. The circumstances surrounding the birth of this newsgroup can now be told, thanks to the location of the original newgroup control message.
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Apparently as a result of the Ivy-League uppity belief that all the world should be like them (and also as a result of trying to avoid studying for exams), one of the posters suggested that they "invade" a real, populated newsgroup and "rile up the stupid people". When Matt Bruce, another of the Harvard band, heard this, he wrote this response:

"I suggest that we start either posting or crossposting to alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead. I also suggest that we use big words and perfect grammar, and refuse to write as the young ruffians in question speak.

"This could lead to some interesting 'dialogue.' "

This article was posted directly to alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead. The regulars at that group, wondering what the world was coming to, scoffed at the notion of a couple of stuck-up geeks from Harvard calling them "ruffians", and a few unpleasantries were exchanged. This crosspost-tossing attracted the attention of an unknown poster going by the name of Dontonio Wingfield. He/she discovered that one of the Harvard posters, Chuck Truesdell, placed "meow meow" (a reference to Henrietta Pussycat of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood fame) in many of his posts as a sort of calling card, as his initials spell "C.A.T.". Matt Bruce picked up on this practice for one post (the quote at the top of this page), and someone, for some reason, took that article out of afk-mn, crossposting it to a dozen newsgroups as a troll against the "Nosers" (as the Harvard students called themselves).
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The posters in the targeted groups, noting the "meow meow" elements, began to retaliate against the supposed original crossposter, Matt Bruce. These posters entered the 'Nose and found it full of other Harvard students like Matt, and the counter-invaders flamed and spewed "meow" with vigor, In time, flames containing the word "meow" would start popping up all over the place, aimed mostly at areas where the high-class uppity Ivy-League snots were known to congregate, such as alt.college.college-bowl. Other flames targeted snobbish college kids who regularly huffed their freckled noses in newsgroups such as alt.music.nin. Some of the more daring souls decided to forge articles in Bruce's name, spreading the "meow" attacks to more and more groups, including afk-mn, to add to the onslaught against him and his "intellectually elite" cohorts.
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When this only fanned the flames further, he [Matt Bruce] threatened to cancel all articles containing the word "meow", and to netcop all the "meow" article forgers. This "Cancellation Notice", posted about a month and a half after the first "meow" troll, was apparently the proverbial last straw. A person crossposting into 12 newsgroups, then claiming it a "joke", when he obviously had no sense of humor? This pissed off the Usenet Performance Artists to no end. it was time to teach Matt Bruce - and the rest of his gang of snots - a lesson. Suddenly, afk-mn, alt.college.college-bowl, and scores of other groups were flooded to the gills and beyond with hundreds upon hundreds of huge meow articles from all corners of Usenet. Cascades, ASCII cats, hundred-line "meow" hello-world-type flood posts, and more were posted, reposted, munged, pureed, and regurgitated all over the servers of the world. The Harvard kids' protests were quickly lost in the feline tidal wave. Every post by a Harvard snot would result in fifty cascade follow-ups. alt.college.college-bowl, a known regular haunt of Matt Bruce, was reduced to a smoldering crater, so inundated with meows that its regulars could no longer use it. After a couple of weeks of this, Usenet in general looked like Chernobyl, or the Marina district of San Francisco after the 1989 earthquake, or downtown Nagasaki the day after the fall of the Fat Man.
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