What the Tech?! Free tech support Archive
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About What the Tech

If you found your way here because you used to post, lurk, or once got talked through a bad infection at 2 a.m. by a stranger who didn’t have to help — welcome back. This page is the short version of how this place came to be, who actually built it, and why it’s still here in this read-only form instead of just disappearing.

What the Tech grew out of a community founded by Tom “Coyote” Wilson. In 2003, he started the Tom Coyote Classroom to train volunteers to fight malware by working through real, messy cases — then sent those new experts back out to help people in the free public forums, the same way they’d just been taught themselves.

Tom gave this community its start, its direction, and a model much of the wider malware-removal world went on to follow. He later said publicly that he’d retired because of cluster headaches — a genuinely hard reason to have to step back from something you built. After he left, the site was sold, and the community that had grown up around his classroom carried on under a new name: What the Tech.

Keeping the doors open

After that transition, Blair took over keeping the lights on: server moves, DNS and mail changes, software and infrastructure upgrades, and eventually the move to the WhatTheTech.com name, all documented in the forum’s own record over the years. None of that behind-the-scenes work is what made this community worth saving. That came from the people.

The people who did the work

The real work here — the actual help, the actual teaching — was done by volunteers, not by whoever kept the servers running. The surviving record names some of that early circle: Galadriel, cnm, LittleRed, Zero, TonyKlein, Metallica, Jacee, MrCharlie, LDTate, paws, CatByte, Digerati, Tashi, and, a little later, ken545. Galadriel took on moderator duties in May 2003 and joined the administration that September. Many more names appear throughout this archive for malware, classroom, technical, and administrative work — this is a representative list, not a complete one.

Behind those names were classroom teachers, moderators, malware experts, tech-team members, and students who spent real time answering questions, reviewing logs, writing training material, and sitting with people through genuinely stressful problems — a hijacked computer, a scared user, late at night, for free. Some of that work is visible in this archive. Most of it — the patience, the repeated explanations, the encouragement — never shows up in a post count.

That was by design. Classroom graduates were expected to volunteer and “pay it forward,” and the forum’s own descriptions from that era spell out distinct teaching, malware, moderation, administration, and general support roles, all working together toward the same thing: helping the next person who showed up scared and confused.

Why preserve it

The live forum is closed now, but what people said to each other here still means something — as a record of early volunteer tech support, and of a lot of people showing up for strangers for no reason other than wanting to help. This archive keeps that public record intact while removing private messages, account-security data, IP addresses, email addresses, signatures, and anything else personal that never belonged on a permanent public page.

Source notes

This history is intentionally short, told from Blair’s own memory of the handover plus what’s still readable in the forum itself. If you have records that would make it more accurate or complete, they’re genuinely welcome — there’s a way to reach us on the Privacy page.

— Blair