Something Awful

One of the world's most famous everything-nothing sites. Their forums are a notorious source of many humorous photoshopped images, including those featured in the AllYourBaseAreBelongToUs video. Home of JeffK, and a few other, lesser-known fictional Internet personalities. Some people mistakenly believe the insult "Asshat" originated on the Something Awful forums. It originated on (some random place on the internet|some movie).

Fame does not always come with riches, and Something Awful is no exception. They've gone through at least three banner ad networks, all of which have run ads on their site for months and never paid them. Nowadays, they sell web hosting, access to their forums, and merchandise.

Every day they select an Awful Link of the Day. Some webmasters of Awful Site of the Day have talked of guestbook invasions and harassment by the many followers of Something Awful.

When the site goes down, its users ("goons") will spread out onto the internet at large; spamming message boards, clogging chat systems, making bogus edits to Wikis, and generally leaving mayhem and destruction in their wake. This lasts until the site is running again, at which point the tens of thousands of "goons" mysteriously disappear.

However, like any community of tens of thousands, this isn't what everyone does. There's a large group of people, albeit a minority, on their forums which quite vocally criticizes guestbook invasions. Planning or partaking in a forum invasion will get you banned from the forums.

The text above was written in May 2004. Since then, the anonymous image board 4chan has become the new griefer magnet and meme factory for the Internet. The site is supported entirely by ads because escrow sites refuse to accept donations on its behalf. So you have all the chaos of Something Awful, but without the admission fee. There are other rival "chans" with varying tolerances for illegal and aggressive content.