William E. Roland died on the second of December, 2025. If you were on The Spring between 1996 and 2014, you knew him. If you posted in porch, or food, or internet, or news, or restaurants — or any of the fifty-eight other rooms in that house — his words were part of the weave.
He posted as ~wer most of the time. When he was hosting the food conference, he just signed Host. In collecting it was ~kitchenmanager. And when something irreverent was called for, he'd swap in one of his spare selves — God's own Satanist, or IAOM, or 1 of 3, or simply Lost. He contained multitudes and he didn't particularly mind you knowing it.
Bill was one of the Spring's great curators. Long before RSS readers and Twitter threads, he pulled in what mattered from the weirder, smarter corners of the early web — CDT Policy Posts on Senate spam bills and Internet Censorship language, NUA Internet Surveys on European adoption rates, CNET Digital Dispatches on USB webcams and the Melissa virus. He'd drop them into whatever conference fit, add a sentence or two of his own, and trust the rest of us to argue it out. Nobody ever appointed him desk editor; he just did the job.
He wasn't only about heavy news. He was equally at home cross-posting a two-thousand-word Christopher Kimball essay about a yellow farmhouse in Vermont, the sort of thing that made the food conference feel for a minute like a magazine. Or a Jack Mauro piece on what a maître d' can tell about a server by watching them carry a folder across a dining room. Bill treated the BBS the way a good town editor treats a small-town paper: everything gets the thoughtful treatment — funny, political, silly, sublime, all in the same Monday column.
He had a voice you'd pick out of a thousand. Lowercase starts. Ellipses standing in for breath. The thing he was about to do always one cup of insomnia away.
gonna try and load it up on the computer at work...just don't know when I'll have the computer to myself long enough to do it...probably somewhere along my next 'bout of insomnia... ~wer · porch · Jul 15, 1998
That was the cadence. It felt like talking to him on the phone at eleven p.m., which for many of us it effectively was.
He was warm with the regulars. Open porch on almost any week and you'd find Bill waving someone back in — or someone waving at him.
Wer!!! Great to hear from you! Yes, I'm still around, my friend...I haven't been on the site much, and, haven't posted in a loooong time, true...I promise to drop in on you folks and see what kind of good things are going on on the board. Laughing Sky, to ~wer · porch · Feb 13, 1999
People came back just to say hi to him. You couldn't be on that board for long and not feel the door held open.
And he tied the whole Spring together. He was forever sending you one conference deeper:
there's a Spring cookbook topic going on in the food conf, and everybody should go check out the collecting conference, as well... ~wer · porch · Jan 9, 1999
He believed the whole Spring was the point, not any one room of it. He browsed the whole house and loved it.
He mattered. Not loudly — Bill was rarely the loudest voice in any conference. He mattered the way a steady current matters: he kept showing up, kept paying attention, kept sending you back to where the good conversation was happening. He was one of the great contributors to The Spring, and anyone who lurked in the late nineties or the early aughts knows exactly what that means.
You can read across the years through his old handles from here. Every thread he posted in is now a link away.