Goehring describes starting the newsgroup "because I felt Usenet needed a place to disseminate the truth about this half-assed religion" and in part as a joke.
A bogus email address, "miscaviage@flag.sea.org" (a misspelling of "David Miscavige", the leader of Scientology), was inserted into the newsgroup creation message.
The persistence of ARS showed that online groups could survive attempts at deletion, accommodate anonymous participation that could not be silenced, and equip users with a platform for the release of documents.
is mainly used for flamers to attack the Scientology religion; (4) it has been and continues to be heavily abused with copyright and trade secret violations and serves no purpose other than condoning these illegal practices.This message was largely ignored (and openly protested) by system administrators who carried the newsgroup.
Starting in 1995, large numbers of rogue cancels were posted to ARS by a cancelbot dubbed "Cancelbunny", mainly against critical articles containing portions of the "Advanced Technology" documents.
To counteract this, a program called "Lazarus" was created to alert original posters of the deletion, suggesting they repost their canceled message.
A group of techies nicknamed the Rabbit Hunters traced the cancel requests to a single user, who got shut down, and later to a few others that had posted pro-Scientology content, leading to a report to the FBI.
[11] In an attempt to "drown out criticism of the church", pro-Scientology forces tried to effectively disable ARS by flooding it with messages until it was unusable or too expensive to read for those with slow connections.
The stated purpose of the starter kit was to make it as easy as possible for Scientologists to create personal websites (hosted by the Church) promoting Scientology.