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The forum list, as seen by an unregistered guest.
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The forum list, as seen by an unregistered guest.

The Something Awful Forums are a group of general discussion internet message boards which accompany the humour website Something Awful. As of June 2006 the forums have received over 37 million posts by nearly 80,000 members[link], and remain notably popular despite the unusual feature of charging an initial fee for access[link].

The forums were created on 16 November 1999 by Richard Kyanka, a.k.a. "Lowtax", who now makes a living from the message boards by selling advertising to members and offering premium services such as access to archives of old forum posts. They run on a heavily modified version of the vBulletin software. The site, like many other message boards, is primarily frequented by persons between the ages of 15 and 35. Members of the site are called "goons".

Contents

Forums on Something Awful

[
  • General Bullshit (GBS) - The most popular forum on Something Awful, GBS is analogous to the "Off Topic" forum of many other internet discussion boards, in that it allows users to start threads on topics not already covered by another forum at the site. Frequent threads include "Photoshop threads", where a member challenges his or her fellow forumgoers to create humourous image manipulations based on a chosen theme, and "MSPaint threads" where users draw pictures on a theme using Microsoft Paint in a contest to see who can produce the most amusing image.
  • *SA's Frontpage / The Daily Dirt Discussion - a sub-forum for discussing articles on the Something Awful home page.
  • Fuck You and Die (FYAD) - This forum is a general discussion forum that houses a special brand of humor mostly rooted in parody or satire of the internet, where almost anything goes. Rules are not as strictly enforced in FYAD as they are in the rest of the forums. This forum uses a special template which is significantly different from the rest of the forums, and its name and description on the forum index often change. Posting in FYAD decreases a user's postcount.
  • BYOB - This forum is a general discussion forum where almost anything goes, a happy medium between the off-topic content rules of GBS and the laid-back atmosphere of FYAD, without the latter's traditional "clique" nature. The rules are almost as lax as they are in FYAD, but flaming is against the rules. Like FYAD, it has a special template. Posting in BYOB does not change a user's postcount at all.
  • The Comment Box - A forum for Lowtax to field questions, comments and complaints from users. Frequent topics include annoying posting trends, ideas for the new forum software and suggestions for new subforums. All threads are started with Lowtax's answer and, frequently, comments from other admins and moderators follow. Regular forum users are not permitted to post replies in The Comment Box.

[

[
  • No Music Discussion (NMD) - for discussion of music.
  • *Musician's Lounge - similar to the Creative Convention, it is used mostly for critiquing and general advice for aspiring musicians. The ML also creates contests for musicians. One of the more popular contests is the ML Massacre, a contest in which each musician contributes about 2 minutes in a twenty minute or so long song.
  • *Concert Calendar - for announcements and discussions of concerts.
  • Cinema Discusso - for serious film discussion.
  • The TV IV - discussion of television programs. TV IV regulars have created The TV IV, [a Wiki of television reference material] hoping to build a replacement for TV Tome.
  • Batman's Shameful Secret (BSS) - centered around comic book discussion and other related topics.
  • Creative Convention - a forum for the more creative members or those who wish to enlist their talents. All manners of art, literature, photography, and even website design can be found within this forum.
  • *Photoshop Phorum - dedicated to SA's weekly Photoshop Phriday image-manipulation contests.

[ Most forums' threads have a category tag and allow users to rate the threads from 1 to 5 bars, with 1 being "Crap" and 5 being "Gold". However, posts in the Review Dump dispense with this and use a 5-star rating system, where readers rate the item being reviewed rather than the thread itself.

  • The Film Dump
  • The Game Dump

The Community

[

Hurricane Katrina

Something Awful and the forums were down between September 1st and September 5th of 2005 when Hurricane Katrina incapacitated its servers in New Orleans. Although the datacenter remained operational using a diesel generator - police radio streams were run from this building - insufficient bandwidth was available to keep Something Awful online.

During this time, site owner Richard Kyanka redirected the site to a temporary page where he began a charity drive for Red Cross Hurricane Relief fund by accepting donations from forumgoers via Paypal, offering free merchandise as an incentive. After reaching the $30,000 mark in under a day, [Paypal locked the account], claiming to have received "more than one report of suspicious behavior" from Kyanka's "buyers". Eventually getting in contact with a customer service representative at Paypal, a furious Kyanka requested that Paypal donate all of the money to the Red Cross. However, he was told that Paypal could only give the money to United Way; Kyanka initially agreed, but after receiving several emails detailing corruption and inefficiency within United Way, he changed his mind and told Paypal to refund all of the money [link]. It should be noted that Paypal did not refund charges on international transactions.

Culture

The SA forums have their own special culture. One large component of it is a widespread detestation of furries [link].

Anti-furryism and the Comedy Lolocaust

Long ago, the posting of "furry" porn, or depictions of anthropomorphic animals committing sexual acts, was not against the forum rules in FYAD. When this happened, the poster was usually rebuked if they did not include a warning in the thread's subject text, and perhaps had their preference in pornography mocked.

As time progressed, furry threads continued to be posted, mostly if not solely in FYAD. As FYAD is not intended to have any rules, the posters were not stopped, though they were taunted endlessly by the other members of FYAD. Lowtax one day decided, however, that furry porn would no longer be allowed in FYAD, setting in motion a chain of events later to be known as the "Comedy Lolocaust", a reference to the Holocaust of World War II.

As the first step of the Lolocaust, Lowtax created a subforum of "The Goddamn Shithouse" (a place where some FYAD-goers got their own forums and became IK (moderators) of them) dedicated to the posting of furry porn, called "The Furry Concentration Camp." This kept all furry threads out of FYAD and in one central location. The denizens of this subforum, along with any others proven to have furry tendencies, were then given custom titles of a large yellow star (a reference to the yellow badges worn by Jews) with the title "Yiff" on top, a reference to a slang term for sexual intercourse in the furry community. Once all of the forum's furries were identified, they were then permanently relegated to the Furry Concentration Camp.

The Camp stayed open for a number of weeks, and while furries couldn't leave the forum, others could come in. The Furry Concentration Camp was soon riddled with threads mocking furries in every way, shape and form. However, when these threads began to die down, the furries who could only post in the Camp soon began to congregate with each other, and only with each other. It became a complete community in itself.

Eventually, the "final solution" (see Hitler's Final Solution) of the Lolocaust was set into place, and the denizens of the Camp were finally banned, effectively ending the mass proliferation of furry porn in FYAD. Currently, anti-furryism is seen as old, and in general is not acceptable unless intensely humorous. Furries are still subjected to waves of banning, but there are now several forum members known to be furries who are generally accepted within the community.

Like many forums trends, the hatred of furries has fallen out of fashion. It is considered passé by most forums veterans and anti-furry threads are usually created by new members in an effort to fit in.

The File Forums

For many years, there were several forums dedicated to the distribution of files. The first was Don't Post Porn Here (DPPH), a sub-forum which dated back to the early days of the forum. Later, two other forums were added: No MP3s (NMP3s) and the BitTorrent Barnyard (BTB) (in which pirated software was explicitly disallowed, although almost any other form of media was allowed to be shared).

Since their creation, it was always strictly forbidden to mention their existence or any information about them to non-members of the Forums. Lowtax and others believed that anyone who joined only for files had nothing to add to the community. However, many people disregarded this policy and invited people to join the Forums for the sole purpose of downloading files.

In the second half of 2004, Lowtax announced a zero tolerance policy for violation of file forum rules. Users who asked the SA staff for tech support related to file forums, requested files without first contributing, or indicated they had only joined to gain access to the file forums were banned without a warning.

This policy was not enough, however. Following an announcement in November, 2004, all three file forums were shut down permanently on Midnight, New Year's Day 2005. Additionally, a complete prohibition on distributing copyrighted work anywhere on the forums was levied (it had previously been allowed in ADTRW and BSS) and a policy of banning anyone who asked what happened to the file forums. Shortly thereafter, No Music Discussion and Cinema Discusso were created to fill a gap left by the absence of NMP3s and BTB, which had previously been used for music and movie discussion.

The File Forums no longer exist on Something Awful and any discussion of file distribution is now extremely unwelcome on the Forums. However, a BitTorrent tracker hosted on [alluvion.org] has been set up to enable (legal) BitTorrent downloads for members of the Forums. For example, self-created MP3s released for critique in the Musician's Lounge are allowed to be posted provided that the poster provides bandwidth.

Punishment

The Forums have an elaborate system of punishment for violation of its various rules and conventions[link]. Punishments are meted out "around the clock" by the various moderators of the Something Awful forums. All of these punishments can be given out by the forum admins for breaking the forum rules and are rarely retracted or reduced. Some rules, however, are suspended in FYAD. Punishments include:

External links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
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