Joel Furr

Who is Joel Furr?

Joel K. "Jay" Furr is a writer and software trainer notable as a Usenet personality in the early and mid 1990s.

He is immortalized in the newsgroups alt.fan.joel-furr, alt.bonehead.joel-furr, and alt.joel-furr.die.die.die. He was a pretender to the throne of James "Kibo" Parry, and the bitter enemy of Serdar Argic. He is also infamous for his Usenet response to the death of Roger Zelazny: "Good".

One reason for Furr's fame on Usenet was his self-appointed leadership over the alt hierarchy, where any user could create a newsgroup without any official vote or sanction by the user community. Before 1992, internet administrators did not carry alt newsgroups that did not obtain some general community assent. However, in the time spanning roughly 1993 to 1995, commercial internet service providers were cropping up left and right, and few of them had time or inclination to manage which newsgroups their services carried, so they carried all groups that were created. Furr attempted to bring some order and rationale to this practice, but with minimal success.