Bruce Baugh lays down some facts on the apparent sale announced by the webpage:

Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 01:15:15 -0700
From: Bruce Baugh 
To: Discussion of White Wolf's World of Darkness 
Subject: WW sale a hoax

    Here's the story.

    1. Facts

    WW's Web site had an announcement from Chris McDonough claiming that the
    company had been sold to some Internet company he'd never heard of.

    If you go to http://www.hunter-net.org/ you get a link pointing you at
    http://www.anonymous-liberty.com . That site is now down (as is the WW
    site). While it was up, it offered semi-libertarian screeds about
    anonymity, with some side rants about monsters and such, and claimed
    that it had bought White Wolf.

    A little work with DNS lookup reveals that anonymous-liberty.com and
    white-wolf.com share a block of net addresses, meaning that they
    presumably share the same local network and may in fact be the same
    machine. Further, Chris McDonough is listed as administrative zone
    contact for anonymous-liberty.com.

    2. Speculation

    Looks like a Hunter publicity ploy to me. If it is, whoever planned it
    utterly failed to gauge the speed of net reaction, and also likely
    underestimated how poorly netizens tend to take such things. Executing
    false-news tricks takes a lot of care; it's very easy to do it wrong and
    get a lot of people riled.

    I expect serious backlash over this. People will not be happy about
    having a big emotional bomb dropped in their laps and then yanked away
    with a grin. I'm not happy about it myself - I'd rather have spent the
    evening doing something other than trying to forestall the spread of
    rumors that WW is about to collapse.

    *sigh*

    --
    Bruce Baugh
    bruce-baugh@sff.net
    Writer of Fortune

Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 15:10:06 -0400
From: Ethan Skemp 
To: Discussion of White Wolf's World of Darkness 
Subject: Re: WW sale a hoax

    Fleishman, Aaron wrote:

    >Ha Ha Ethan. We know you're just sittin at your desk watchin the emails fly
    >by with a big grin on your face. Not very funny. Although a good gimmick,
    >still not very funny. So fess up.

    Bull*shit* I'm sitting at my desk, grinning. My email's been down for the
    morning, interfering with some legitimate work I could've been doing, on
    account of all the emails and hits this little stunt has inspired
    crashing our site.

    And you think *I'm* mildly irritated, you should see the guys in Sales
    who've been trying to assure our distributors, translators and other
    customers that it's not for real.

    If you wanna send "ha ha, very funny, now never do it again" emails, send
    'em to Chris.

    Ethan Skemp
    WWGS