[GD]

Interesting post from /r/SC

I've debated on posting this for years. I've typed it up numerous times and deleted it. I keep thinking "who's going to care?" But if this can give some people a bit of insight into someone that has personally dealt with Dave Meltzer, then have at it. Back in the early 1990's, I created a wrestling news website as a part time hobby while in high school. It was nothing flashy as my father was just teaching me the beginnings of HTML. So yes, I had plenty of cheesy GIF backgrounds and used dashes and spaces for line breaks. My wrestling news site consisted of local show results I compiled from friends, results of TV broadcasts (Superstars, Wrestling Challenge, etc.), fan fiction stories that readers sent in, a "News... NOT" section (not, like in how they used it in Wayne's World) where people could send in random bullshit like "WWF is in negotiations with Abdullah the Butcher", etc. Again, this was in the early 90's. Actually, 1993 to be exact. This was before the WWF/WWE had a website. Before WCW had a website. I didn't even have a domain name. I was just feeding off of my father's ISP account website from his monthly service plan. So it was a long URL about 40 characters long and had plenty of random characters. The site became popular. I was getting 20,000 viewers a month and usually 100 emails a week. Hey, back then that was a ton. The emails would be results from live events all over the world. Many emails were photos (BMP format, so they would take about 40 minutes to download a single photo... and I'd have hundreds attached.) I had regular content submissions from a family in Germany we nicknamed "The Sour Krauts", so they got my personal mailing address and they constantly mailed me Iomega Zip Disks filled with photos from different wrestling events they took from all over Europe. Running the website was a handful, but I loved it. I loved the interaction from the fans that loved the same thing that I loved. Sure you got some hate here and there, but it was pure joy being able to share something that someone from so far away had, that otherwise had no other way to share with others. I liked being that middleman. I liked being that person that was able to open that door between continents. "Hey, person in Siberia! Someone in Brazil likes the same thing that you do! Here! Look!" But then Dave M. showed up in 1995 and started to make my hobby a nightmare. I know that by taking in submissions from viewers, you're not always going to be getting 100% legitimate content. Sometimes people will try to pass off others work as their own. Well, if you hadn't figured it out, someone sent in a "News... NOT" submission that was a one-sentence long snippet someone took from his newsletter. That was all it took for Meltzer to declare war on my site and make my life a living hell. Email after email he threatened to sue me for plagiarism. Even months after the archived snippet had been removed and I had sent in a heartfelt apology. It felt like it had become a game to him. It felt like his main goal was to just try to run me out of town. To weed out the competition. The competition, mind you, that was a high school kid that was doing this as a hobby for fun. Where it finally came to an end was when he emailed me and asked if I had permission to use WWF content on my website and if I didn't that he was going to report me. I never responded. A month later, I come home from my job flipping burgers and my mom is sitting at the kitchen table, scowling, with a white envelope with a WWF logo on it and a two page Cease and Desist letter from the WWF lawyers demanding that I discontinue use of their trademarked works. That night I shut my website down. I'm in my early 40's now and I sometimes get the urge to get back into the fun of it. Then I keep remembering that people like Dave are out there and their goal isn't about it being "fun", making it fun, or opening the doors between continents. It's nothing more than a fast hustle with a never ending supply of easy content to cash in on. Just to clarify, Dave didn't destroy my life; I'm doing just great. The only thing he took away was that passion I had for one thing that I found fun. Other than that, I still enjoy pretty much everything related to wrestling.