Something Awful
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Something Awful LLC. | |
 |
|
| Type | Company |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1999 |
| Founder | Richard Kyanka |
| Headquarters | Lee's Summit, Missouri, United States |
| Key people | Richard Kyanka, David Thorpe |
| Industry | Web Based |
| Products | somethingawful.com Awful Video City Name Sports Team MoofWear Awful Gear Awful Mart |
| Website | www.somethingawful.com |
Something Awful, often abbreviated to SA, is a comedy website housing a wide variety of content, including instant messaging pranks, digitally edited pictures, and humorous media reviews. The site and forums have had a part in the creation and promotion of several Internet phenomena.[1][2][3]
Contents |
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.
Several sponsors, including GameFan and eFront, failed to compensate Kyanka as promised for advertising on the site.[5][6]
In 2001, the site began charging a one-time fee (currently US$9.95)[7] for forum access. Currently, non-members can view the forums with additional advertising, but are not able to post messages or threads. The site and forums draw continuous income from[8] fees for new accounts, forum upgrades such as custom avatars, and merchandise sales. Some suggest that the forum fee keeps undesirable users out [9]
Content
The content of the site consists of Comedic writings and internet pranks. Among the site's many writers and contributors, some of the most notable are:
- Richard Kyanka. The creator of Something Awful.
- Dr. David Thorpe. Writes the "Your Band Sucks" section, and collaborates with Zack Parsons on "Fashion SWAT." Thorpe has appeared on behalf of Something Awful on Attack of the Show!,[10] giving a tongue-in-cheek description of the site.
Forums
Something Awful's Internet forum has helped to create or perpetuate several Internet memes, such as All your base are belong to us[2] and Tourist guy.[1]
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.[11] Lowtax did, however, get his name mentioned in the magazine.[12]
Controversies
Hurricane Katrina-PayPal conflict
Since the website's servers were located in New Orleans, the site temporarily went offline 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,[13] and promised to give some free merchandise to anyone who donated more than $10.[14]
In under half a day, visitors helped to raise $27,695.41 US 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."[14][15] 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.[15] 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 could only give the money to United Way; 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.[13]
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. 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.[16]
Uwe Boll
Richard Lowtax Kyanka was challenged to a boxing match with Uwe Boll over criticism of Boll's movie found on Something Awful[17] [18]. This eventually resulted in an exhibition boxing match between the two in which Boll was declared the winner.
Unpaid taxes
Something Awful, LLC was brought to court in 2003 for unpaid taxes.[19]
References
- ^ a b Tourist of Death. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
- ^ a b All your base.... Guardian Unlimited (2001-02-28). Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
- ^ All Your Base Are Belong To Frogstar. Retrieved on 2006-11-24.
- ^ http://www.hypothermia.us/interviews/interview_lowtax.html Interview with Lowtax Kyanka on Hypothermia
- ^ Dan Knight (2000-10-11). Something Awful & Express.com. Low End Mac.
- ^ Tim Johnson (2001-03-13). eFront: What Went Wrong?. The Duke of URL. Archived from the original on 2002-06-17.
- ^ Jeremy Turnage (2006-01-23). Something awfully funny. Retrieved on 2007-02-13.
- ^ Jeremy Turnage (2006-01-23). Something awfully funny. Retrieved on 2007-02-13.
- ^ Sameer Pitalwalla. "A friend for every buddy", Daily News and Analysis (DNA), 2006-11-11. Retrieved on 2007-03-12.
- ^ Episode #5113: Somethingawful.com, Pink Five, Chris Gore. Attack of the Show. G4 (2005-07-12).
- ^ Adam Gaffin (2001-11-30). The most useless software ever. Network World. Retrieved on 2007-02-06.
- ^ Michael Small (2001-11-30). Fan Flare. Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved on 2007-02-06.
- ^ a b Farivar, Cyrus. "PayPal Freezes Out Katrina Aid", 2005-09-08. Retrieved on 2007-02-18.
- ^ a b Koprowski, Gene J.. "Feds Investigating Fraudulent Katrina-Related Web Sites", 2005-09-26. Retrieved on 2007-02-18.
- ^ a b Demerjian, Charlie. "All your donations are belong us", 2005-09-04. Retrieved on 2007-02-18.
- ^ John Leyden (2003-08-08). Something Awful going on with SPEWS. The Register. Situation Publishing Ltd..
- ^ Kietzmann, Ludwig. "Uwe Boll does something awful to another critic", joystiq, 2006-09-25. Retrieved on 2007-03-12.
- ^ Chris Baker. "Raging Boll", Wired, 2006-12-01. Retrieved on 2007-03-12.
- ^ Thurston Superior Court reference 03-9-23195-1
