It looked like the attack was a spoofed DNS that invited Freepers to login to their fake website server thereby giving up their password as part of the login which the hacker then used to make bogus posts on the real Fresno server.
Possible, but easier to run a password cracker against FR usernames to get their password then use those accounts to spam FR. The FR (”virtual”) server is now in the Dallas area (”Linode”). The old physical server that John R. had co-located in the San Jose, CA area (NTT data center) was retired after NTT closed their data center there.