tiggy's right, Allyson. It was Spring, 2001. I was brand new, and inclined not to believe it, until so many old timers seemingly did. I knew nothing about PCs or the internet, but copied and pasted "Cairo's" post on "Djoser" and saved it as a draft in my email, because it hit every single one of my alarm buttons. I wonder if I still have it...

Oh! I do. That's rare, that I save something that long. It made a horribly big impression on me--one I've never quite gotten past.

Here:

Cairo says:
(Fri Apr 27 07:34:05 2001 208.4.95.62)

Uncle Karn says I have to go
and pack. We are leaving this
afternoon. The babies are
going to stay with Aunt
MaryGrace. Mum says the only
thing that lasts forever is
words like the things that we
say and write. Everything else
just goes away. I just want
someone to remember
Djoser. His faverite story is
Winnie the Pooh and his
faverite song is How much is
that doggie n the window. He
sucks his thumb but he's
trying not to and shen he
wakes us in the morning his
hair sticks up in the air. He is
black like me. He likes it when
I take a piece of paper and I
move it over his face really
light. eh smiles when the sun
shines and when I'm being
Buffy and I stake somebody.
He likes it when you rock him
and when he can have
peaches. His faverite toy is
my old grey elephant. He
thinks he looks just like Da
when he walks around with
his hands in his pockets adn
when he doesnt have pockets
he pretends. He hates it when
he is blue and can't breathe
right adn if he could get
enough air he would cry when
it happens. He likes to sleep
next to Poe because she is so
big adn soft. He laughs when
you give him a bath. He'll
always be my brother even if
he can't be a vampire but it
would have nice if he could.
and I lvoe him. There now
Djoser will live forever,

It was a skinny post (like your AOL ones at the Bronze used to be, Allyson). I tried to preserve the formatting above. I think DX said the t pre causes problems, so I've just put in t br instead.

One of them made up cancer for herself and a few other things.

The big one that made the news was that girl on LJ waaaay back in like 2000, I think. Or earlier. Maybe it wasn't even LJ. Nicole something?

And she had cancer, or leukemia, or something, and the community rallied around her, and sent her presents, and she showed pictures and everything. I think she even spoke to people on the phone.

When she "died", nobody was able to find an obituary notice, and then people started investigating. Turned out the girl didn't exist at all; she was made up by a woman in her 40s or 50s. The photographs were of a classmate of the woman's high-school-age daughter, a local basketball star.

The daughter was pressed into service to play the part of the dying girl on the phone when people called.

Quite a scam. The woman who did it claimed she did it to raise the profile of this particular kind of disease, and I know a lot of people laughed it off as weird performance art. But it's the sort of thing that can cause a lot of damage to a community.

Have Buffistas had a Munchausen by Internet?

t shudders reflexively

If we have, I'm not aware of it. Unless Zeo really wasn't broken...

There's a crackpot in Nikita fandom who tries to distract everyone from her plagiarism by either posting about her husband's brushes with death or her own. Car accident, suicide attempt, brain injury, etc.

It's a weird way to live. I check up on a friend's cousin's baby every couple of days. She was born with a genetic deletion and some severe birth defects over a year ago; lately I've been reacting to her parents' messages with "Don't you think it's time to let go?" because I am a creepy judgmental person.

Contrariwise, I keep a daily watch on getupgrrl's infertility blog, because she is a heartbreaking combination of funny and wise and angry. I want her to be happy; I've never met her nor never will but she's real to me. I cannot imagine how I'd react to her not being real.

I am writing about Munchausen by Internet

I doubt that this distinction will be relevant in your writing, but in case you run into it in your research, the formal diagnosis for this kind of behavior would be Factitious Disorder. The different names can make it confusing moving back and forth between medical sources and popular descriptions of the phenomenon. Munchausen is and informal/archaic name for a subtype of Factitious disorder that isn't necessarily the subtype most resembling these internet cases.

I'm sure that it's better for you to use the term Munchausen's because it's the term that has captured the public imagination, and everyone knows it is used metaphorically rather than formally, but if you decide to look for an expert opinion in MedLine or elsewhere you should also search for Factitious.

How much do I love the word factitious? Hugely. Factitious ... fictitious...factitious.

So would you say your love for the word is....gianormous?

I'm not really going that deep into what it is, I'm just talking about what happened. But thank you!

The nice thing about Munchausen by Internet is that nobody actually gets hurt, physically. (Plenty of feelings hurt, but no injury.)

On the internet, nobody knows you're not a cancer patient. (Until such time as you tell a really huge whopper, and get caught.)

I'm not really going that deep into what it is

Yeah, I'm just being a psychology geek. The relationship to the traditional diagnosis is interesting because, as Nutty says, faking illness or misfortune to gain attention and sympathy on the internet is much less likely to result in harm to the individual than faking illness to gain attention and sympathy from the medical community. Your invisible internet friends almost never do an exploratory surgery on you or prescribe drugs that interact badly with the drugs you are already taking or put you in the hospital so often that you lose your job. So if "Munchausen by internet" gives people the attention and support that they used to get from medical professionals, without the bad "side effects" of medical care, then people are better off with the new disorder.