Dave's Wife, I am horrifically (if that's a real word) fascinated by your topic of study. Yikes!

I've seen exactly what you have on Mudcat, which is as you say, nothing, compared to the heavy-duty soap operas on the huge sites you're describing.

About eight years ago I was active on a couple of very large social forums, and while there was some of the sympathy gathering-story debunking stuff going on, the most obvious unpleasantness was the development of what can best be described as 'clan feuds', where segments of communities would begin by bickering over some imagined (or even real) sleight, continue with wholesale slander and namecalling, progress to code-hacking to interrupt each others' sub-forums, include a little real world harassment, and end by everyone leaving the original forum to go start their own. I just quit those forums cold after a couple years. There were some very interesting and lovely people on them, but the daily drama got really old.