Usenet Celebrity - Unusual Personalities

Unusual Personalities

These are individuals (or user-IDs) that are unusual for reasons other than being eccentric.

• B1FF (or BIFF) – well-known pseudonym and prototypical newbie on Usenet. Posts usually consisted of uppercase text containing many bangs ("!"), typos, "cute" misspellings, the use (and often misuse) of fragments of chat abbreviations, a long signature block, sometimes a doubled signature, and exaggerated naïveté. The BIFF pseudonym was originally created by Joe Talmadge, also the author of the infamous and much-copied Flamer's Bible. Joe posted twice as BIFF and after that Richard Sexton, who posted as BIFF A few dozen times over the next year or two.

• Joel K. "Jay" Furr – Usenet poster in the early 1990s immortalized in the newsgroups "alt.fan.joel-furr", "alt.bonehead.joel-furr", and "alt.joel-furr.die.die.die". He was a pretender to the throne of James "Kibo" Parry, and the bitter enemy of Serdar Argic. Furr was also notable on Usenet for his self-appointed leadership over the "alt" hierarchy during the commercial expansion of the Internet (ca. 1993–1995), during which he attempted to bring some order and rationale to rampant newsgroup creation, but with minimal success. According to Brad Templeton, Furr is one of the earliest people to refer to unsolicited electronic messages as "spam".
• Gharlane of Eddore (1947–2001) – pseudonym of David G. Potter, a science fiction writer and critic in Sacramento, California, who was widely known for acerbic, scathingly humorous and knowledgeable postings to Usenet science fiction newsgroups. He guarded his true identity carefully for many years before his death in 2001. His chief surviving non-fictional work is the Lensman FAQ and voluminous Usenet postings.
• The Internet Oracle (a.k.a. The Usenet Oracle) – collective effort at humor in a question-and-answer format, wherein a user sends a question to the Oracle via e-mail or the Internet Oracle website, which is then randomly sent to another user who has asked a previous question. This second user may then answer the question. Meanwhile, the original questioner is also sent a question which he may choose to answer. All exchanges are conducted through a central distribution system which also makes all users anonymous. A completed question-and-answer pair is called an "oracularity". Many exchanges make allusions to Zen koans, witty word play, and computer geek humor, as well as in-jokes.
• Kibo – pseudonym of James Parry, who provided the basis for the formation of an entire newsgroup, "alt.religion.kibology". Kibo was known for his high-volume but thoughtful posts, but achieved Usenet celebrity circa 1991 by writing a small script to grep his entire Usenet feed for instances of his name, and then answering personally whenever and wherever he was mentioned, giving the illusion that he was personally reading the entire feed.
• Mark V Shaney – pseudonym of an automated program that used Markov chain logic to recombine the text of posts into nearly coherent posts.
• Publius – anonymous poster who, from 1994 to 1995, used the Penet remailer service to deliver cryptic messages to "alt.music.pink-floyd". These posts revealed that an enigma had been hidden within Pink Floyd's The Division Bell, and Publius called upon fans to find the solution. Although the remailer service was shut down in 1995 and Publius has not been heard from since, the puzzle and the prize for solving it were acknowledged by Floyd's drummer, Nick Mason, at a book signing in 2005, the Publius Enigma has never been officially solved.