Eric's AOL Screen Name Taken Over

EthanEmerson wrote:

If I spoke with anyone else, I don't know who it was. It's highly possible, but without a screen name to compare to saved buddylists I wouldn't know.

It's quite possible you might've talked with William Atchison considering his online history.

Ay, it's possible. I don't know when he started trolling the net, but I think I stopped using the screen name prior to 2012. I signed on a few times between then and 2015, but most people were off of AOL at that point. I think I just missed Adam Lanza's developing interest, as I took my site offline just as he said he was starting to research.

EthanEmerson wrote:

Ay, it's possible. I don't know when he started trolling the net, but I think I stopped using the screen name prior to 2012. 

Well he joined Encyclopedia Dramatica at the age of 11 (which was in 2007) and I'm pretty sure he was trolling some parts of the web even earlier than that. So I'd say it's likely he reached out to you at some point.

Just found this topic again for some reason in Google and wanted to address your comment, Jenn, that I think I skipped.

I love how there are so many things taken out of context with what I've said and who I am, it's completely ridiculous, and yet I'm not going to leave any issues unaddressed here.

The website I ran was receiving between 200k-450k page views per month as of 2006. From January 2006-October 2006 the site had 2,545,949 page views. Estimating that "tens of thousands" of people contacted me to talk about Columbine is very accurate. There were over 1k people who contacted me on Eric's AOL name (I saved multuple buddy lists of 200 people each since that was AOL's limit) I had so many emails I couldn't even reply to all of them. I left people hanging for weeks, months, and sometimes years when I missed emails that came in and didn't get to many of them for literally years and sometimes I never responded at all. People contact me through AOL, the website, CRTF, my guestbook, and on the discussion forum I created in 2000 that had a couple thousand active posters. I was still fielding old emails about 6 years after I stopped running the website and profusely apologizing to people for never getting back to them.

If Facebook and other social media groups existed at that time, I'd have had "tens of thousands of followers" but instead it was in the days of email, so I got emails. Why is it so hard to believe that xx,xxx people would contact the webmaster of a site with a subject they're interested in? Facebook and YouTube accounts collect MILLIONS of followers and nobody thinks that's hard to believe... 10-20k people contacting a webmaster through a very niche website is small potatoes in comparison.

My initial editor told me the same thing. She said that number seems exaggerated and I should leave it out or change it. So, I fired her as my editor because I won't omit the truth. The reason that number is important to state is because the context is designed to show just how many people were interested in Columbine throughout the first decade after it happened. It's not about puffing up numbers for some arbitrary reason. I don't have time for that nor do I care about numbers. It's to say, "look, people, parents, you have no idea how many people are intrigued by this incident and your kid could be one of those people... this is how many people contacted me about the incident through my website and Eric's old AOL name... it's not a small deal."

Clarity for clarity's sake because it's super annoying to have my words twisted, taken out of context, and declared to be what they are not. Anyone can ask me about something that seems to not make sense. The internet is a giant game of telephone.

Oh the other thing I wanted to clear up is that I did not scan the 1999 yearbook. People keep crediting me and it wasn't me. I scanned only a few key pages but it was not the full yearbook. Somebody else did that.