[3] The newsgroup was created before there was a World Wide Web, which emerged in 1993, so those earliest discussions were held on text-only platforms.

[6] From its inception, users used the newsgroup to discuss the quality of the episode, as well as to talk about continuity errors and trivia.

[4] The newsgroup also provided The Simpsons Archive with information on the characters and the setting, as well as a compilation of articles about the show and interview with its cast and crew.

[8] Among the most frequent topics of discussion were the real-life location of Springfield, the sexuality of Waylon Smithers,[9] and "Who Shot Mr.

[11] Although the alt.tv.simpsons community debated this mystery to an extreme degree,[12] no one officially guessed the right answer, and therefore no one was ever animated on the show.

[4] The first such instance occurred in the seventh-season episode "Radioactive Man," in which Comic Book Guy is logging on to his favorite newsgroup alt.nerd.obsessive.

The writers respond by using the voice of Bart Simpson:[16] Comic Book Guy: Last night's Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever.

In the seventh-season episode "Treehouse of Horror VI", the writer of segment Homer3, David S. Cohen, deliberately inserted a false equation into the background of one scene.

[19] After the episode aired, Cohen lurked on the newsgroup to see the response; at first there was astonishment when users tested it, but later there was despair when they found out it was only accurate to eight decimal places when expressed in scientific notation.

In 1994, Simpsons creator Matt Groening acknowledged he and the other show runners have been reading the newsgroup and in frustration said, "Sometimes I feel like knocking their electronic noggins together".

"[21] Writer Bill Oakley used to respond to select Simpsons fans through e-mail in a friendly manner,[22] but by 1996 claimed "[t]here are people who take it seriously to the point of absurdity".

[24] In the chapter "Who Wants Candy" in the 2004 book Leaving Springfield, Robert Sloane finds alt.tv.simpsons an example of an "active audience ... who struggle to make their own meaning out of the show".

[16] Chris Turner writes in the 2004 book Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Documented an Era and Defined a Generation that The Simpsons appeared tailor-made for a newsgroup in the early 1990s because it includes minor details that reward attentive viewing and can be easily scrutinized.