Ever head of the Mormon Bloggernacle? Neither had I until tonight. So, basically my family is Mormon, and we were having some church friends over for pie, and my mom’s friend told this story about the ultimate drama in the bloggernacle back in around 2005.
This was before facebook and most other mainstream social medias (myspace was getting started around this time too), and the mormon blogging community was big, but very close knit. Everyone knew each other and some blogs reached significant popularity. Now, my mom’s friend, R, had a blog too, one of the top read at that time in the community.
This is where the trouble came... R, her sister, and several of their friends decided to make a blog with fake characters telling fictional stories. The blog was called Banner of Heaven. They each were a character who all had traumatic, dynamic, funny stories, and it was extremely well written (fun fact! -one of the bloggers now writes for hollywood shows). This hoax was a p new concept especially in this community, and so for a long time no one suspected. It gained a huge following (my dad read it too!), each post had hundreds of very sincere comments offering advice, condolences, ect. R, after one post began to feel unsure about this, but told her friends she wouldn’t out them, and even did a guest post (as herself) and wrote comments as if she didn’t know.
However, eventually the rumor got out that it was fake, and after months, their IP addresses were found out and tied to their personal blogs. The Banner of Heaven blog was taken down, and R’s readers, and many more felt devastated and betrayed that the people they had invested so much feeling in weren’t real. R’s blog was momentarily blocked, one of them came back to the blogosphere, but never had the following he did in the past, and the rest stayed away forever.
