The Pikforum Story - Chapter 7: Under The Bridge

Soon, Cowbell, a minor troll from PR was, perhaps regrettably, told about PL by OP at Rauru's Raturn. He came over and trolled a bit, but that was just Cowbell. Then one time, I allowed Louie to put some emoticons in the Cbox, but after he was done I accused him of putting inappropriate ones, like a sperm emoticon. He said that he didn't put it. Possibly, that was PM using the account, since he got it. Nothing too serious had happened... yet.

After a while trolls showed up. Many trolls. They couldn't get in the forum, but they posted over and over in the chatbox. Cowbell suggested that the spammers were from Flannel Shirt Discussion, made up of the more shady PR members. The spamming lasted several days when I suddenly, I had received an e-mail saying that Cowbell had done all of the trolling, including the trolling done at PL, and I promptly deleted his account in anger, but this was a big mistake of mine.

Later, Cowbell explained to everyone how obvious it was that the e-mail was a troll itself, and although his IP  for another account was unbanned, he was furious enough to leave the forum and complain about PLR on other forums. Everyone felt bad about this, but there were more pressing matters. The spam continued, and Hyper was exchanging e-mails with the spammer to find out who he was. The e-mail was "terryboe" but that may have been a reuse. Orange Pikmin frantically compared IPs, but the spammer was using a different IP every time he appeared, so that was no use, probably suggesting that the spammer was using proxies.

The spammer claimed to be several other people, including Foo and PM, but his/their identity is still unknown, although there is a great possibility that it was PM. I was certain that it was PM because he was talking like PM and he was informing me about how he felt when PL went down, but this is still not 100% certain. The mysterious spammer(s) had knowledge of things that would require a mix of PM and a regular on PR. Eventually OP proposed that the Cbox simply be moved to a members-only section. I did so, making any spammers that tried to make an account very easy to spot. Now the trolls have completely vanished from PLR, and peace has returned.