SOMETHING AWFUL

'Something Awful', often abbreviated to 'SA', is a comedy website housing a wide variety of content, including feature articles, digitally edited pictures, and humorous media reviews.
The site was created by Richard Kyanka in 1999 as a largely personal website, but as the site grew, its list of contributors and content grew as well. Since then, the website and forums have grown to be influential on the Internet
and have helped to perpetuate several Internet phenomena.^[1][2][3]
Something Awful has also been involved in some conflicts over its history, such as an eventually satisfied tax warrant against the site; a confrontation between the Spam Prevention Early Warning System and forum members, which almost led to a DDoS attack by Something Awful's forum members; and having a Hurricane Katrina charity Paypal account frozen and caught in bureaucratic red tape.

Contents

History

Uwe Boll fight

Site content

Forums

Entertainment Weekly prank

Conflicts

Unpaid taxes

SPEWS controversy

Hurricane Katrina-PayPal conflict

References

External links

History

Something Awful was created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka,^[4]
who remains in control of the site despite the proliferation of other contributing writers and administrators. Kyanka's status as the webmaster has earned him cameo placement in geek culture, such as an Easter Egg in the video game Icewind Dale II.^[5]
Kyanka started Something Awful several months before being forced to resign from his job at PlanetQuake for writing a derogatory website update about a fellow employee. He moved the "Cranky Steve" personality in question to the site in 1999.^[6] 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.^[7][8]
In 2001, the site began charging a one-time fee (currently US$9.95)^[9] for forum access. Currently, non-members cannot view all of the forums and are not able to post messages or threads. The site and forums draw continuous income from fees for new accounts,⁹ forum upgrades such as custom avatars, and merchandise sales. Some suggest that the forum fee keeps undesirable users out.^[10]

Uwe Boll fight

Kyanka was challenged to a boxing match with Uwe Boll over criticism of Boll's movie found on Something Awful.^[11][12] This eventually resulted in an exhibition boxing match between the two in which Boll was declared the winner.^[13]

Site content

Something Awful is home to a variety of humorous content, including photo manipulation, parodies, pranks, satirical reviews of products, and reviews of obviously poor websites, video games, and movies. The material is written by several different editors, and occasionally by members of its forums as well. 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'', although 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.

Forums

The site is home to a collection of Internet forums, which have the unusual characteristics of charging a one-time registration fee of US$9.95 and fees ranging from US$4.99 to US$9.99 for additional features. The forums have helped to perpetuate several Internet memes, such as All your base are belong to us
and Tourist guy.

Entertainment Weekly prank

During ''Entertainment Weekly's "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 Lowtax dozens of times per second, thus ensuring his victory. Lowtax was quickly disqualified when ''Entertainment Weekly'' found that many of the votes were coming from very few IP addresses.^[14] Lowtax did, however, get his name mentioned in the magazine.^[15]

Conflicts

Unpaid taxes

In December 2003, prosecutors in Thurston County, Washington filed charges against Something Awful, LLC for failure to pay taxes on revenue. The tax warrant was satisfied in March 2004 and vacated in 2005.^[16] Lowtax has stated that the tax charges were the result of an accountant's error after his move to Lee's Summit from Seattle.^[17]

SPEWS controversy

On July 20, 2003, the spam filtering organization Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS) added an entire class-B subnet with the Cogent ISP to their spammer list, since Cogent was hosting a known spammer which SPEWS was finding difficult to block. Something Awful was added to the list in the process, disrupting its ability to communicate with its customers. Upon appeal, SPEWS initially refused to unblock SA. The Something Awful administrators responded by telling their users to spam the official SPEWS newsgroup at ''news.admin.net-abuse.blocklisting''. The 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.^[18]

Hurricane Katrina-PayPal conflict

Since 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,^[19]
and promised to give some free merchandise to anyone who donated more than $10. Feds Investigating Fraudulent Katrina-Related Web Sites Gene J. Koprowski
In under half a day, visitors helped to raise US$27,695.41 before PayPal froze the account under suspicions of fraud; automated messages informed that there had been "more than one report of suspicious behavior from your buyers."^[20]
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. Kyanka has subsequently encouraged his users to boycott PayPal.

References

1. Tourist of Death
2. All your base...
3. All Your Base Are Belong To Frogstar
4. Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka

5. Icewind Dale II - Lowtax reference!
6. Here's Mud In Your Eye, Batman

7. Something Awful & Express.com Dan Knight
8. eFront: What Went Wrong? Tim Johnson
9. Something awfully funny Jeremy Turnage
10.
A friend for every buddy

11.
Uwe Boll does something awful to another critic Ludwig Kietzmann
12.
Raging Boll

13.
Boll K.O.'s crix in the ring Tamsen Tillson
14. The most useless software ever Adam Gaffin
15. Fan Flare Michael Small
16.

17. oh no CRISIS IN WIKIPEDIA DOT COM!!! Lowtax
18. Something Awful going on with SPEWS John Leyden
19. PayPal Freezes Out Katrina Aid Cyrus Farivar
20. All your donations are belong us Charlie Demerjian

External links

★ Something Awful

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