Something Awful, often abbreviated to SA, is a comedy website housing a variety of content,
including blog entries, forums, feature articles, digitally edited pictures, and humorous media
reviews.
It was created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka in 1999 as a largely personal website, but
as it grew, so did its contributors and content.
Since then, the website has helped to perpetuate various Internet phenomena, and it has been
cited as an influence on Internet culture.
Since the website's creation, it has been involved in a number of notable events.
These include a conflict with the Spam Prevention Early Warning System, a Hurricane Katrina
relief fund being caught in PayPal's red tape, and an exhibition boxing match between Kyanka
and movie director Uwe Boll.
History Something Awful was created by Richard "Lowtax"
Kyanka, who controls the site and is supported by other contributing writers and administrators.
Kyanka started Something Awful several months before leaving his previous job, after using
his "Cranky Steve" persona to write a comedic website update deriding the attitude and work
performance of a fellow Planet Quake administrator.
He moved the "Cranky Steve" personality he had created to the Something Awful site in
1999.
In the years immediately following Something Awful's launch, several sponsors, including
GameFan and eFront, failed to compensate Kyanka as promised for advertising on the site.
In 2001, the site began charging an activation fee for forum access.
Non-members are not able to post messages or threads.
Non-members were unable to read the forums as well, for random periods of time, as part
of paid sign-up drives.
From the second half of 2013 and on, this state is permanent.
Non-members have not been allowed to read the forums since then.
The site and forums draw continuous income from fees for new accounts, forum upgrades
such as custom avatars and access to the forum archives and search features, and merchandise
sales.
Reportedly, this "10bux" cost scheme was originally implemented for the following reason, as taken
from the forum rules page:
We here on the Something Awful Forums are very elitist and strict assholes.
We pride ourselves on running one of the most entertaining and troll-free forums on the
internet.
This is accomplished by charging a $10 fee to filter out folks not serious about adhering
to the rules, and banning those who manage to slip through and break them.
We are very serious about keeping our forums clean and troll-free, so please consider your
account an investment and treat it accordingly.
Read the rules, use common sense, and help keep the SA Forums the best message board
on the internet!
Spam Prevention Early Warning System On July 20, 2003, the spam filtering organization
Spam Prevention Early Warning System added an entire class-B subnet with the Cogent ISP
to their spammer list, since Cogent was hosting a known spammer that SPEWS found difficult
to block.
Something Awful was added to the list in the process, disrupting its ability to communicate
with its customers who were using SPEWS.
Upon appeal, SPEWS initially refused to delist SA.
The Something Awful administrators responded by telling their users to post their support
in the Usenet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.blocklisting.
However, that group and news.admin.net-abuse.email were flooded with off-topic posts and trolls
from Something Awful users, incensing SPEWS advocates.
The SA administrators claimed that SPEWS was attempting to hack the Something Awful server.
Forum users responded by threatening to perform a distributed denial of service attack on
SPEWS, although this type of behavior was strongly discouraged by Kyanka and assistant
editor Zack Parsons.
Hurricane Katrina charity As the website's servers were located in New
Orleans, the site temporarily went offline in August 2005 during the flooding from Hurricane
Katrina.
After the site was brought to a semi-functional state, Kyanka set up a link to a PayPal account
where people could donate money to the survivors of the hurricane via the Red Cross.
Kyanka put in $3,000 of his own money, and promised to give some free merchandise to
anyone who donated more than $10.
In under half a day, visitors helped to raise US$27,695.41 before PayPal froze the account
under suspicions of fraud; automated messages said that there had been "more than one report
of suspicious behavior from your buyers."
PayPal stated that they would unfreeze the account once it was provided with proof of
shipping from aggrieved buyers.
Due to the nature of the collection, there were no actual "buyers", and it was impossible
to provide proof of shipping for an intangible good such as a donation.
Eventually, Kyanka contacted a customer service representative over the phone, and asked to
have PayPal donate all of the money to the Red Cross.
However, he was told that PayPal would only give the money to United Way of America due
to their business affiliation; Kyanka initially agreed, but after receiving several emails
from readers detailing alleged corruption and inefficiency within United Way, he changed
his mind and told PayPal to refund all of the money to the individual donors.
PayPal refunded the money, but did not refund exchange and handling fees for international
donors.
Public appearances In October 2005, Richard Kyanka was invited
to speak at the University of Illinois for their reflections❘projections seminar hosted
by the Association for Computing Machinery.
The presentation, "Enabling the Online Community through Vertical PSOTs and Automated Adverse
Content Delivery Systems", primarily focused on Kyanka's professional history, the development
of Something Awful, and internet subculture.
Uwe Boll fight
In June 2006, Kyanka accepted an open challenge from German movie director Uwe Boll, who had
offered to fight critics of his movies in a series of 10-round boxing matches.
Something Awful had posted a humorous review that was critical of one of his films.
The event took place in Vancouver, British Columbia on September 23, 2006; after being
knocked down several times and eventually forfeiting the fight in the first round, Kyanka
claimed that he had been told by Boll, a trained amateur boxer, that the fight would be just
for show.
To that effect, Kyanka purportedly acted like a silent film comedy character during the
fight rather than seriously attempting to fight Uwe Boll.
Shooting deaths In 2005, William Freund sought advice in the
Something Awful gun subforum about purchasing Hevi-Shot brand ammunition several days before
embarking on a "shooting rampage", in which he killed two people before committing suicide.
Freund had stated in the thread, which was closed before the killing spree, along with
his ability to post comments being revoked, that he intended to use the ammunition to
defend his Halloween pumpkins from vandals.
On September 25, 2007, a forum user posted a thread about a double homicide in Oviedo,
Florida that involved an acquaintance.
As the thread grew, other forum users eventually found the website of Andrew Allred, who posted
on the forums as "Bomber166".
The website contained significant details about the victims and the murder; Allred's
account was subsequently banned and Allred himself was later arraigned on two counts
of homicide, attempted murder and armed burglary.
He has since pleaded guilty to the murders of Tiffany Barwick and Michael Ruschack.
Slender Man The Slender Man urban legend was created on
a thread in the Something Awful forum begun on June 8, 2009.
On May 31, 2014, two 12-year-old girls in Waukesha, Wisconsin, allegedly held down and
stabbed a 12-year-old classmate 19 times; when questioned later by authorities, they
reportedly claimed that they wished to commit a murder as a first step to becoming "proxies"
of the Slender Man, having read about it online.
Site content Something Awful is home to a variety of content,
including photo manipulations, parodies, pranks, satirical reviews of products, and reviews
of websites, video games, and movies.
The material is written by several different editors, and occasionally by members of the
forums.
On July 12, 2005, David Thorpe, the author of the features Your Band Sucks and Fashion
SWAT, "represented" the website on G4's Attack of the Show.
He made several absurd claims, such as that the site started up as a monster truck rally
newsletter and that the forums were a front for a cult that required a registration fee
of $80 per month.
On June 4, 2007, website columnist Jon "DocEvil" Hendren wrote "The Art of Wikigroaning", coining
the term wikigroaning.
Wikigroaning is a game in which readers explore two Wikipedia articles with similar topics
of contrasting seriousness, such as half-life and Half-Life, and compare the length and
comprehensive depth of the articles.
Hendren's article was featured in the Wall Street Journal.
The frontpage article series Golan the Insatiable is the basis of an animated series of the
same name that premiered on Animation Domination on Fox on July 27, 2013.
Forums The site is home to a collection of Internet
forums running a highly customized version of vBulletin, charging an initial registration
fee of US$9.95, with fees ranging from US$4.99 to US$29.99 for additional features.
The forums have spread several Internet memes, such as all your base are belong to us and
tourist guy.
The forum's users refer to themselves as "Goons".
A weekly activity is "Photoshop Phriday", where users will modify existing images to
create parodies through the use of image-editing software such as Adobe Photoshop.
The website also highlights some of what its administrators believe to be exceptional forum
threads in the Comedy Goldmine feature.
A forum member also launched 4chan, and the Let's Play phenomenon originated in posts
on the Something Awful forums.
During Entertainment Weekly's 2001 "Entertainer of the Year" contest, in which votes are submitted
online, forum users quickly found a weakness in the voting system, and scripts were written
to vote for Kyanka dozens of times per second, thus ensuring his victory.
Kyanka was quickly disqualified when Entertainment Weekly found that many of the votes were coming
from very few IP addresses.
Kyanka did, however, get his name mentioned on their website.
US diplomat Sean Smith, who was killed in the U.S. Consulate attack in Benghazi, Libya,
was a moderator of Something Awful's Debate Disco forum under the username Vilerat.
The Blue Ball Machine A prominent periodic activity within the forums
is "The Blue Ball Machine", where users create animated images that tile together in such
a way as to appear like a seamless whole; these tiles are incorporated into a screensaver
which displays them in random order.
The feature gained popularity when users on the website YTMND looped the animation to
music from Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
See also 4chan
Anonymous Digg
Facepunch Fark.com
News aggregator O RLY?
Reddit Slashdot
References
External links SomethingAwful.com