"Date: 19 Dec 2003 17:49:53
From: Richard Lawson
Subject: Revisiting FANG

Anyone remember the invasion of the FANG people a couple of years ago? A
bunch of people from the Fight Ace News Group decided to "take over"
alt.games.everquest. In typical troll fashion, they declared themselves
the
leaders of EQNG (EverQuest NewsGroup) and made a series of proclamations
about how the "new" EQNG would be formed and reassuring us that the old
hangers-on of a.g.e would eventually disappear.

As you can imagine, it led to some volatile flames that spanned the days
and
weeks. The trolls were carefully engineered to elicit outraged responses
and, as human nature has proven to be reliable, people rose to the bait.
Our trolls battled their trolls in an epic battle.

In the end, of course, the FANG people eventually went away and things
went
back to normal. As to what caused it to happen in the first place, I'm
guessing it was a bunch of bored people taking a swipe at an easy target
-
after all, EverQuest was several orders of magnitude more popular than
Fighter Ace.

Today, for no reason, I decide to track down what had happened to FANG.
The
original newsgroup is dead because Microsoft no longer owns FA. But FA,
to
my surprise, is still around and is now up to version 3.6. The
newsgroups
can now be found at news:gamenews.vr1.com.

I took a look for our "old friends". Thunder_Princes couldn't be found.
Neither could the Ardent Avenger. I did find GetSumJ, who just two days
ago
announced that he was quitting Fighter Ace.

Don't know what prompted me to look that all up, other than a desire
maybe
to see what had become of the trolls. Like most trolls I've come across,
they burned out. Being a troll takes a toll - no pun intended - on your
psyche, I think, and eventually the troll either burns out and stops
posting
or becomes completely psychotic. I've seen both happen.

Anyone else remember the FANG days?