Something Awful and Friends - The roller-coaster train-wreck embarrassing downfall of a Web 1.0 giant and its tick offspring like from Cloverfield

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This guy changed his name from SolarNativity to brag about how much joy he takes from watching snuff.
Screenshot 2025-09-15 071032.webp Screenshot 2025-09-15 070921.webp
It took three whole days for him to get called out for what he did. Why hasn't he been perma'd and had his name changed to "ENJOYS GORE VIDEOS"
 
For the veterans SoA netziens on this thread: How was it back then?, when the forum & internet at large where a wild west of freedom at large?
For what it's worth, there's still a lot of cool fucking things on the internet. You just have to go out of your way to find them. That was true then and it's true now. The people who complain about the state of the internet now would have never been able to figure out the places they wax nostalgic over never having been to. It's also easier to make a website than it ever was before. The people who say it used to be easier back then are looking at the technical challenges of 20 years ago with the tools they have today. They never had it, they don't get it, and they never well. If you ever catch yourself doing this: make something weird and put it on a website you make, otherwise quit your bitching faggot.

It felt like being in community with a bunch of people you'd never want to meet IRL. What I mean by that is that the coolest people who were goons would never talk about it IRL because it was just a website, but there were plenty of people who made it their whole identity and would go around asking being IRL if they had stairs in their house. Those people all became Redditors and Penny Arcade Expo mods. The people I know IRL who were on that site either are some of the best people I know, or some of the worst and I earnestly hope they drop dead.

Some of the funniest things I've ever read or saw were on the forums. The thread that convinced me to buy an account was this guy whose neighborhood had some sort of summer fundraiser where they'd put a wood cutout of a family of snowmen on your lawn and you'd pay to get rid of it. He asked the forums what to do about the situation since it felt like extortion and they said cut off the heads. So overnight, he did. I don't even think they were on his lawn. One of the heads accidentally landed in some dog shit. A few days later he posts a local newspaper story about how someone did this and how they "smeared" one of the heads in dogshit. It was amazing, and the thought of showing anyone related to the issue the thread was un-thought of. Though there was one thread where a guy was posting about actively interviewing with a three letter agency, was talking about it on the forums, and then at one of his interviews with him they had printed out the thread and slid it over to him.

I got multiple free copies of Windows Vista that I sold for hundreds of dollars because someone figured out how to hack the games Microsoft made to award users Microsoft points. I got a great deal on a PSP off of SA Mart and all sorts of other stuff. There was a site that sold bongs online ran by goons when that was still a very sketchy thing to be doing, but they offered discounts. Goon discounts in general could be pretty steep and sometimes it made sense to just buy an account to get a deal on something. Private game servers were great. It was worth dropping money on a newly released video game because participating in the game's thread upon release was fun. I played MGS3 like that and it was one of the most fun gaming experiences I ever had. If you couldn't afford the game, there were let's play threads. Advice threads on just about any topic were super helpful back then given the state of the internet; you could (and probably still can) get decent advice on buying or building a computer, firearm, guitar, arduino, etc. Goons could be snarky, but mods were good at culling the faggots that would shit up threads like that. There was a recipe wiki and I still use the recipe for the cinnamon rolls that was posted there, it's in my personal cookbook. There was a Goon streaming video service called gbs.tv that operated like a TV channel with blocks and schedules. It's how I fist learned about Mystery Science Theater and I loved staying up on the weekend to watch it. They even made custom content like every week they had a block where they'd play the top 10 YTMNDs of that week.

Here's one of my favorite pictures from the site.

t3hM3.webp
 
At the same this picture was being being taken, not 30 yards away, a guy was going Ass-to-mouth with a curvy goonette in a tent.
emot-gooncamp.gif

I remember when this story broke and how fuckin funny it was because without fail, every goon meet-up resulted in some extraordinary display of degeneracy or embarrassment in ways people couldn't expect.
 
For the veterans SoA netziens on this thread: How was it back then?, when the forum & internet at large where a wild west of freedom at large?
You could post a lot of edgier humor during the Lowtax-is-not-quite-a-fag-yet years. Eventually, you could only speak freely about the decay of the website on fyad, helldump or my personal favorite site - SASS - Something Awful Sycophant Squad. Eventually, with all the 'Tax baby mama drama, the website never got updated, routinely broke basic features and was sold to Jeffrey of YOSPOS for some unknown bitcoin-funded sum of money.

Sadly for us SASStronauts, we no longer have Hangly Man's profile badges to show off our autism or the frequent slapfights between forum users Rocket and Procrustes. Even SASS ended up a dilapidated website that was eventually taken over by DOGTRON 5000 and abandoned all-together. I'm glad to see @Ghostse is still here at least from the SASS days.
 
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I also meant to mention that Null's MATI episode where he does a history of the site and Lotax is the best I've seen and I think gets closest to what the site was like. It's impressive given that he wasn't there for it, unlike many people who claim to have been there and written articles or have done videos in the past.
 
Sadly for us SASStronauts, we no longer have Hangly Man's profile badges to show off our autism or the frequent slapfights between forum users Rocket and Procrustes. Even SASS ended up a dilapidated website that was eventually taken over by DOGTRON 5000 and abandoned all-together. I'm glad to see @Ghostse is still here at least from the SASS days.
Just remember, Rocket is not a lawyer.

And Sips Cum is a faggot who lied about the ass pics.
 
I like how there's a whole log on the actioned posts and nearly every time someone probes then someone else comes in and goes NOT LONG ENOUGH.
To be completely fair:
On Something Awful, the janky customized phpBB under the hood hs multiple levels of Janny. There are Thread Mods (IKs, or Idiot Kings), there are low level mods (IK for every thread on a board, i forget the term they use), Mods (powers over an entire board), and then Admins.
Also only the most recent punishments apply.

IKs can only issue 6-hour probations, and shittalk in the hidden ModForum. The 6-hour probe is often used as joke, but when used as intended was either to get one or both parties of a slap fight to cool off (or more often: to silence dissent from the approved catlady/tranny talking points to manufacture the appearance of consensus) or to keep them from posting while higher-level jannies got their mops.
They can't edit posts or do any other mod actions, just shut someone up for 6 hours, and if they want a harsher punishment, make a case in the ModForum. They also couldn't propose harsher action.

Mods were able to edit posts, and issue probes upto a week (I think it was a week, it might have been 30 days). They could request bans and 30 day probes, but these had to be approved by an admin. They could not request Perma/100,000 via the tools but could make a case in the mod forum thread. This would result in some really odd probes because Mods could only act on boards they were mods on, so if you angered one of their pets, they would sob to the Mod they brown-nosed and if you didn't post on that mod's board often they'd have to go digging for an old post and use that to punish you.

Admins can of course ban/permabann/100,000 hour probe anyone on any board. This also lets Admins countermand punishments. If you get a 100,000 hour probe from one admin but have another Admin to call in a favor from, you can get a 6-hour probe and that overwrites the 100,000 hour one.

Almost all mod actions are debated on modforum.

So sometimes you'll see these escalating punishments where an IK will probe someone for 6 hours, then a mod will come in, give a longer probe while also requesting something more severe, which an Admin might approve and then decide it might need to be longer by putting their own punishment in place.

The most common you will see is "30 day probe + Ban". Per one of the "transparency posts" around the end of Lowtax's reign (I believe it was Jeffo, but I don't remember if he'd bought the forum with his cryptobux or not) Jeffo said that 30-day Probe + Ban was a 'soft permaban'. When looking at a poster in the future, if there was a Ban+30 in their punishment history, even if they reregged it was a sign to just straight up ban them the next time they got out of line. Sometimes even if they were toeing the line and some Janny just wanted to ban someone.

@HondaRider271 did I get anything wrong?

Even SASS ended up a dilapidated website that was eventually taken over by DOGTRON 5000 and abandoned all-together.].
It wasn't abandond it was killed.
Zog-o-tron, angry over parentheses usage, chimpouted after the poll he posted was overwhelmingly told him to step down and the legions of SS posters who supported his reign and begged him to stay never showed up to publicly defend him. To this end when he handed SS to his hand picked successor and not the one the the community asked, he deliberately slow-walked the process so there was a ~1 month gap between his version going down and the board coming back with new fagmin/new hosting.
Zogotron posts on KF now and still believes he wasn't a gaped-ass faggot during this process. Niggerdeath Jesus still acts like he didn't fight tooth and nail to remain nailed to his cross until the last possible second because it was the first and last time he'd have actual power.

Anyway, Shabbos Goy-o-tron made sure he wasn't the faggiest runner in SS history by handing it over to Aran, the bitch-titted cuck, lego enthusiast, ghetto dweller, and insurance scammer. Aran at some point got buttmad over the people posting on the SoSe discord clowning on him because his wife took a "canoe trip" and he got cucked by a lesbian,and then deleted the board.
 
Smartest kid in America. First recipient of the 10000 hour probation.

Didn't he troon out?
I honestly have no idea. I just remembered his name from a similar named character here. The only one I briefly tried to follow up on was a pretty intelligent non-GBSer who turned out to be a pedo or something worse. Shii.

Edit: LOLOLOL Yep, fishmech now identifies as "Heather."
 
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