PhysicsForums, founded in 2001 as a science-help forum, preserved its old URLs and archives long enough to serve as a record of early online discussion. An examination of its accounts and post history finds that this record has been altered: user ravenprp’s profile grew from 74 posts in a 2019 archive to 2,891, with thousands of posts inserted later and backdated. The additions portray ravenprp as an implausibly prolific expert across many scientific and technical fields. Other accounts show similar anomalies, including replies made years after users’ recorded last logins. These changes overwrite the distinction between real contributions and generated text while leaving the original account holders’ names attached.
The investigation compares post IDs with timestamps, reasoning that IDs should generally rise as dates advance unless older-dated material was added later. After accounting for a legitimate 2022 import from MathHelpBoards and other plausible database changes, it estimates about 115,000 retroactively inserted, LLM-generated posts, affecting at least 110 users, including the forum’s founder. The argument is that this is a concrete instance of the Dead Internet Theory: not simply a web crowded with bots, but human-created archives being quietly diluted by machine-written material. Some additions offer summaries or links, but the examined calculator discussion includes unsupported claims and little useful information. People whose identities and past contributions are reused may never know what is now being said in their names.
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