I joined in September '99. I think about that time as “when the board was yellow” and there were little light bulb icons for forums read vs. forums unread.
There were a few that totally believed the death story and got really upset when it was questioned. I think the majority of the death believers were just into an unsolved internet mystery, true or not. I recall quite a few threads shut down, so you are right about the snark boards.
That set off a 
in my memory. Just a short time thing I think.
A day or so before Wally’s ‘death,’ a former member of this board was set to arrive in Toronto to try to meet up with him. He then up and died. Coincidence? Hmmm. . . .The info on his death came from an email from his ‘daughter’ Amy (that was her actual user name, although I suspect it might have been a Wally sock) to a member of this board. That was the sole notification.
That’s pretty much the way I recall it playing out. IIRC, there was a lot of surprise that no one had met him in real life. Everyone thought someone else had met him. Turns out, nobody had.
I didn’t much care for him but a lot of posters liked him and sought out lines of his they could use as signatures.
Wasn’t there plagiarism talk when he disappeared?
The daughter account started posting maybe a month before the “death”. There was a fair amount of plagiarism where he would post something he found elsewhere without attribution. His most famous post that everyone loved was written by someone else. The original author found out about it and asked that it be taken down. There were a couple of threads about it. I’ll see if I can find them.
That was easy. Here are two, there may be more.
Sorry for the late bump, finally got a chance to read the threads linked by @hajario.
I knew Wally was a big deal, but it’s weird that someone who posted such a short time brought out the vitriol in so many people. In the first link, post three, posters are cautioned by another poster to be careful what they post. Seven posts later, a mod steps in and drops a mod note telling people to watch what they say. Eventually, a mod closes the thread. What’s so weird is that this thread started almost three years after he faked his death.
I like to think that if someone tried that now, they would be found right quick. Then I remembered at least two other times that people have lied about themselves and were popular on the board. Maybe not.
ETA: Here’s a link to the Wally tribute pages on Internet Archive in case anyone is interested,
Yeah, for reasons known only to the mods, they had some serious attitude about discussing Wally’s situation. In one of the threads (possibly llinked above), TubaDiva said something to the effect of “Well, we can’t prove that he didn’t die.”
Yep, that’s copied by someone, not linked, so you can’t follow the link back.
Bit like Melin, but she is totally erased from the board. Understandable with her posting.
Would you mind if I PMed you with a couple of questions about the snark boards at the time? I didn’t really follow then so I’m a bit in the dark. I have no intention of bringing it up on the boards at this late date, just curiosity on my part. Feel free to refuse, no hard feelings on my part.
Melin was not deliberately erased. (At least, as far as I know). Her time was back in the ubb days, in threads that were locked because of the extreme passions involved and hurtful things that were said. And because those threads were locked, the screen names weren’t converted to the early vBulletin format, and when the board got updated to the later vBulletin, Melin’s posts like the others of that era lost the screen name. But, as with the other such threads, if you know how to look for them you can still find them.
Oops, I should clarify. A specific thread was definitely erased, and the erasure of it was a centerpiece of a very prolonged and angry discussion. What I should have said was that there was no methodical universal erasure of Melin.
Feel free, but don’t expect much in the way of info, as I wasn’t a participant on those pages. Also, a lot of the off-board discussion (and gossip) occured in livejournal.
She’s actually fairly easy to find because she signed her posts so she shows up in a lot of the " system" threads.