It was in the early 2000s when everyone was getting online and mentally deficient people started the Internet Troll/Spam War. Quite literally, if you had a blog on Freeservers or any other platform and whether it covered hobbies, art or anything else you suddenly found yourself at the end of abusive comments, rumour mongering and much more.
Comics was the worst genre affected. I had emails from comic figures/personalities that they never sent. Female creators or fans got a lot of abuse but in what existed as a You Tube comic community back then vloggers worked together in identifying the trolls and they were given an ultimatum to stop or have what they were doing online forwarded to their families. One troll was so disgusting toward a female blogger and her children and it was found he was married and had kids; "Does your wife know you call women this online?" It all stopped.
Myself, well it is well documented that trolls -cowardly little fungii- from the dying British comics industry began a campaign against me in the late1990s. Eventually it led to these people being reported to their ISPs and even legal threats. I ought to point out that I did not know, never met or worked with any of these people. It was just a case of nasty little people wanting to be nasty on the internet -two I approached at a comic event literally ran off in the other direction! Another, along with two pals, threatened to "get physical" if they saw me at an event. I saw them. They saw me. They didn't hang around.
Twenty six years on (yes, 26 years) these same people still tell their lies, try to spread false rumours and at one point bullied spineless event organisers to stop me going to their events. I am living rent free in the minds of people I have never met and only one I would recognise!
It looked at one point that groups and blogs would just collapse and disappear under all of this. No. Some grew (my Google Plus account hit 2 million views in a couple months) but what killed them were Freeservers, Yahoo and Google once they decided money was more important.
Oh, of course, starting a "Flame War" (argument online) and name calling was a trick to increase views -people really thought they would be the "shock jocks" of the internet. One insisted on being insulting and sending me links to his wannabe comic blog and took every opportunity to attack me personally -in fact his comment section and posts were just...me (I can understand that!). And he was really very too excited over his main post: "No name comic blog DEMANDS free comics". PDF comics were sent for review but then never appeared in print and people who paid in advance complained -to the platform CBO was on at the time- and although the platform showed that I had no involvement I made a declaration that I could only review printed comics in future because that was solid proof that they did exist. So my line "Sorry but due to all the problems with PDF comics sent in for review never being published and people losing money I can only review printed books in future" became "I DEMAND YOU SEND ME COMICS!!!"
Rather than concentrate on what his blog was about -supposedly comics- his whole blog seemed to be there to attack me personally and criticise CBO. I corrected him once in his comments section about why I could only review printed comics which he declared was me attacking him personally and that was it. He tried stoking things up but, do you know what? His blog vanished within a couple months.
I explain this as someone was saying that people might not comment on CBO out of fear of being the subject on online abuse. No. All comments are moderated and since this version of CBO was set up in 2011 no abusive comments.
Comics and discussion of comics should be fun.
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