[cagenut]

This is really old fuzzy memory, but at one point there was some kind of administrative or staff plugin for AOL that would let you put in a sub-site-ID and jump straight to some of these things. A bunch of people started using a several-years-old superbowl message board to trade warez. It was like operating out of an abandoned stadium... but over 28.8.

[0942v8653]

Reminds me of http://www.xkcd.com/1305/

[buro9]

Sounds like Yik Yak

[mcoliver]

It was called AOHell. There were a few variations under different names. Just found a box of floppies at my folks house. Cant wait to see what the time capsule holds

[briandear]

Lots of fun with that one.. Fake (but valid) credit card generator, mail bombs.. I'm surprised users of that didn't get arrested. Luckily the statute of limitations ran out on that a while ago! Not that it would affect me or anything..

[digi_owl]

Not sure if it was here on HN or somewhere else, but that reminds me of a story about someone finding odd conversations in his blog comments.

When he inquired the people involved about what they were doing he found them to be school kids that used the comments section of blogs as makeshift chat rooms to get around school site blockers.

[Alex3917]

It wasn't a plugin, it was just a search bar with a feature called keywords. Typing in the keyword would take you directly to the page of that section of AOL. I remember the woman who started the astrology page was making money hand over fist.

[Falkon1313]

There was also a way to automate actions to occur on login. My PC motherboard or RAM went flaky and started crashing after a few minutes in Windows. Not enough time to do much. So I wrote a login script that would go to my email and each of my message boards and newsgroups, downloading any new messages quickly enough before it crashed. Then I'd boot to DOS and take my time reading and preparing responses. Then reboot to Windows and hope the responses all got sent before the system crashed.