Obviously the Jimmy Hill Saga isn't the same degree as this, and that wasn't the point I was making.
You've said people were pretending to be his friends, but that it wasn't real, and that this was your big moral epiphany that led you to close down the private sub-forum. Yet the sagas were full of trolls who manipulated him by pretending to be his girlfriends and confidants. You bring up BlueSpike and mention him telling Chris to burn his house down. Did you miss the part right before that when he tells Chris that Julie, who Chris had professed his love for, had drove to Ohio to meet, and against his parents' specific prohibition, isn't real, and is in fact a 12-year-old boy? This is the same emotional roller coaster with a slightly different form, a few years later.