Quote from Fernando on Jun 26^th, 2008, 7:36pm:

Perhaps you mean "legally accountable adults"?
 
Quote from Fernando on Jun 26^th, 2008, 7:36pm:

I'm sure that their intentions are different.  However, what you are saying there is understandable.
 
Quote from Fernando on Jun 26^th, 2008, 7:36pm:

Why would someone want to start using your persona and character?  Do people have no imagination to make up their own?
 
Quote from Fernando on Jun 26^th, 2008, 7:36pm:

There is nothing wrong with liking oneself.  Personally, I'm not too proud of myself, and I'd have to admit that I quite dislike myself.  So long as people stay in the "median" of the self-esteem spectrum, without hitting either extreme end (either outrageous arrogance or horrendous self-loathing) I don't see any real problems.

Quote from Fernando on Jul 2^nd, 2008, 3:49pm:

 
That's not a defeatist mentality, that's pretty much the limit of what recourse, legally speaking, anyone has. Weathering out an attack from the -chan retards and encyclopediawhateverica without bothering to respond is not exactly difficult, since it apparently turns out that the average high school morons making up 99% of the demographic of those sites don't really have the mental acuity to do anything severely harmful. What are they going to do? Manage to get off one post with a bunch of foul language and a few adult shock images before they get permabanned? Wow, good for them. I hope it made some little kid feel really big that he knows how to use the post button. And, in 24 hours, will anyone even remember their jackassery? Nope. I think not, because fundimentally, it doesn't technologically undermine the forums.
 
More importantly, the response rather than the attack is kind of the point. When you get all angry and loud about it, without it doing any good or you being able to do anything to retaliate, then they know they've gotten under your skin. If you don't let it bother you and all they can see is that their attacks are coming to no effect, not even getting noticed other than to silently disappear without a trace, it's frustrating, or at least holds no thrill anymore, for them, because they're not affecting you. They're not accomplishing what they'd set out to accomplish.

Yes, I was there. As someone who was there, my memory is that I was personally watching 4chan, and they never went down for a timeframe anything like the "several weeks" you're describing. Nor do I remember that any of the ancillary sites they liked to use went down, since I was also watching a number of those.
 
The claim to have brought them down is frankly kinda hard to believe for that reason, and for the fact that it's not, in reality, just as easy as what you're saying you did. It's been ruled in (I think several) past court cases that the administrators / owners of an online message board are not legally and financially responsible for the actions of their users (because that's like suing a little corner restaurant out of existance because some bank robbers planned their heist there over dinner). On top of this, 4chan's threads don't identify specific IP addresses of users, so there's no way to positively correlate their users to your attackers to prove your case, and on top of that their threads vanish so quickly that after maybe an hour it's often impossible to prove that some specific thread ever even took place at all without access to 4chan's internal server logs (assuming those logs even exist, since they're rumored to turn over and wipe at frequent periods), and 4chan isn't going to have those over without a subpoena, I'm pretty sure.
 
Basically, I'm thinking that you could have sent them any invoice you want, they (both 4chan and their ISP) would have shrugged, crumpled it up, and tossed it in the closest wastebasket. They're not the ones getting in trouble or forking over cash over crap like this, and they know it. If they were likely to go down, they've have gone down before the Cafe, because they've fried bigger fish in their time (so to speak).
 
All that said, I'm willing to fight to protect the Cafe, in any way that I can. I agree with you that there's not exactly enough proactiveness on the administrative side to protect things. Politically, I also think that a big factor in fueling the will of certain idiots to attack in the first place is the moderation staff's (Indy and Framwinkle being the two I'm looking at here) often highly misguided leadership and policy setting that helps to alienate and antagonize people unnecessarily. But in that fight, I want to be realistic about the scope of what can really be done. One of the best policies in dealing with attacks like this is, at least in the public venue, to stay unpassioned, unimpressed, and generally silent, and create the impression that they are having no significantly disruptive effect and that these worms are beneath you (which, in actually, is very often true if people would just not let themselves get all disrupted over it). This is all a psych game to these kiddies. You have to look at some aspects of it in that way, rather than as a purely technological war.