What was the background of the ragequit, and what was Ian's start in the community?
First off, you have to realize, by the standards of Usenet at the time, Ian wasn't even a lolcow as we now call them. He was just another spergy teen/20 something in a place loaded with them (myself included). The culture of shwi by the time had developed into a place with its own unwritten social rules and cliques. It had aspirations of being far more academic and literary than its science fiction roots really merited. In order to be a poster in good standing, you had to be able to cite whatever au courant works were written on the subject and be somewhat disdainful of other aspects of geek culture that were deemed lowbrow, as well as avoid discussing alternate history deemed tired, overdone or implausible (even when the POD attempted to do a plausible or novel take on it)
Ian wouldn't or couldn't abide by these unwritten rules. I don't remember when he showed up. It was very high traffic group at its peak, and I wasn't much into the discussion threads he frequented the most. Rest assured that he quickly made a name for himself by being remarkably thin-skinned, pompous and pretentious in a group filled with posters who shared those traits. Generally speaking, regulars would do their best to needle people like that, and most of us grew thicker hides in the unmoderated environment. It became a regular cycle for him to post, get heat for talking out of his asshole about shit he didn't know very well, flame out, and disappear for a stretch, only to return like nothing happened later.
Given that he would often talk down and patronize others, eventually another poster dug up his personal webpage of the time and posted it to the group. Ever wonder why Ian is so sensitive about having his pictures posted and being doxxed? Well, at the time, nearly every picture of himself on his page was of him wearing a black turtleneck with rimless spectacles and his hair combed back. Remember the old SNL skit with Mike Myers called "Sprockets"? Ian looked like a blondish version of the character Dieter. I think he was actually trying to mimic Steve Jobs new look on returning to Apple, but it really didn't work. Given his pretentious yet vapid nature, it became a sport to call him Dieter, or post "TOUCH THE MONKEY!" when he was sperging out in threads. This naturally enraged him beyond anything else, but he couldn't do shit about it.
When he finally posted he was starting his own forum after one of his flameout cycles, even back then, he said that it was due to the Usenet being choked with spam at the time, which was true, but everyone knew it was because he was a butthurt SOB, and everyone predicted it would be an empty echo chamber. We didn't want to accept that the Usenet was dying and that the next generation of youth were going to be solely on the web. Hence Ian ended up being the first person to start an alternate history forum just as a flood of young Millennial history geeks were hitting the web at the same time and the rest is history. He just happened to be at the right place and time, and first starter momentum has kept it going ever since.
I think he's gotten bored of history a long time ago, and doesn't really get much pleasure out of running an alternate history forum. He does get pleasure out of being a dictatorial cunt, which is probably the sole reason he still runs it. He's not very engaged with it, which is probably why he hasn't destroyed it in a pique. Fucker does have a long memory of grudges. People who trolled and needled him on shwi have had membership applications denied decades after the fact.
It should be noted that by the standards of shwi, he was a rather small and unremarkable dweeb compared to group legends like Adam Yoshida, Jordon Bassior, Robert Meza and author S.M. Stirling who would be considered massive lolcows with endlessly flowing milk nowadays.
