Meow Wars

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The Meow Wars were an early example of a flame war sent over Usenet which began in 1996^[1] and ended circa 1998. Its participants were known as "Meowers".^[2] The war was characterized by posters from one newsgroup "crapflooding", or posting a large volume of nonsense messages, to swamp on-topic communication in other groups.^[2] Ultimately, the flame war affected many boards, with Roisin Kiberd writing in Motherboard, a division of Vice, that esoteric Internet vocabulary was created as a result of the Meow Wars.^[1]

The wars began when some Harvard students, who had "colonized" an abandoned newsgroup for fans of Karl Malden, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose, and were using it as a community newsgroup for such posts about daily student life, jokingly suggested harassing members of the Beavis and Butthead fan group alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead, would be a good idea. One of the students — who was actually using a Boston University address, since he was an alumnus — announced the plan on Usenet on January 9, 1996.

The original "Meowers" were denizens of the alt.tv.beavis-n-butthead newsgroup, who responded to the "invasion" by adopting a "scorched earth" policy of rendering the alt.fan.karl-malden.nose newsgroup unusable. They began including the word "meow" in their posts in a reference to a karl-malden user with the initials CAT;^[1] the "meow" itself was a reference to Henrietta Pussycat, a character from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.^[3] Once the Harvard students abandoned alt.fan.karl-malden.nose, it became the Meowers' base of operations for what they called their "Usenet Performance Art". The Harvard students retreated to a private news server. After taking over alt.fan.karl-malden.nose the Meowers decided to expand their campaign of operations, and spread throughout the alt.* hierarchy, to the so-called "Big 8" groups, and out to the wider Internet. The invasion and disruption of various groups lasted for over one year.