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

  • 🏰 The Fediverse is up. If you know, you know.
  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Something Awful said:
Yes, they have your IP address. Use a VPN, you should be doing that anyway. And they have to check accounts manually if they suspect someone is a perma-banned rereg, which they usually won't bother to do unless you post something crazy like "I don't think people with XY chromosomes can be women".
Click to expand...
Didn't Fistgrrl keep a list of names connected with buying an account? It was something like that.
 
Smaug's Smokey Hole 2 said:
Didn't Fistgrrl keep a list of names connected with buying an account? It was something like that.
Click to expand...
Dunno, but little known fact: you can put a fake name in the form when making a purchase. It seems there’s no system in place for actually comparing it against the name under which your credit/debit card is registered.
 
Something Awful said:
Dunno, but little known fact: you can put a fake name in the form when making a purchase. It seems there’s no system in place for actually comparing it against the name under which your credit/debit card is registered.
Click to expand...
No longer the case.

Smaug's Smokey Hole 2 said:
Didn't Fistgrrl keep a list of names connected with buying an account? It was something like that.
Click to expand...
Worse than that. they used to keep names, address, and CC#s.


Tl;dr:
When you take Credit Cards, you don't run the numbers to the bank itself. You need to use a payment gateway company. Merchant takes the numbers, gives to Gateway, gateway checks them against the Card company and authorizes/rejects the transaction.
"Square" is a gateway you might be familiar with.

SA used to self-host their payment gateway code. I forget the details, but they used to collect the information then send it up to the gate way, and they logged all this in plain text incase the data send failed so they could resubmit. Back in the early early days IIRC lowtax (and then a one of lowtax's bitches) would manaually run the numbers to the gateway every night.
Enterprising admins collected this data and used it for their own posting vendettas.

Soemtime after I think it was 2012, this wasn't even CLOSE to PCI compliant so they changed their portal and started using a payment portal page provided by their payment gateway company (and switched gateways?) so SA no longer actually touches your data. They can still get redacted reports but it requires cross referencing specific transaction IDs.

I am not certain about SA specifically, but most payment processors offer you a way to reject specific cards and peoples.

I have forgotten the source on that but I think it was the SA ad guy who came to SoSe.
 
The Taco Santo! said:
Didn't he reveal that lowtax continually left large amounts of money on the table because he was unreachable/pilled-out and drunk/too lazy to respond to messages or make any decisions?
Click to expand...
Lowtax was so lazy he almost got arrested for Mail Fraud because he couldn't be bothered to ship out merch that people had bought that was sitting in his office for months or years.

He had literally done the hard part of the job, then fucked the dog until it almost landed him in jail on federal charges, and I recall reading he ended up losing money due to shipping rates jumping while he procrastinated.
 
The Taco Santo! said:
Didn't he reveal that lowtax continually left large amounts of money on the table because he was unreachable/pilled-out and drunk/too lazy to respond to messages or make any decisions?
Click to expand...
Yes. That was a large reason why Ad Guy left Lowtax's employ; he would set up meetings with advertisers/networks and Lowtax would just... not show up. Ad Guy did Ad Guy stuff as a full time job and helped out SA as a side project because he enjoyed the forum. He stopped enjoying the forum and decided the $30-40,000 he was making off lowtax wasn't worth the headache and it was hard to justify his salary as a chunk of Lowtax's declining forum revenue.
If only a fat faggot hadn't had a tard rage due to being cucked we could find the thread and confirm.
(Or if a Al bundy never-was had been able to ignore the JIDF chip in his brain.)

Lowtax would also be completely unable to be reached for days at a time, driving the admins crazy as they were left to try to run the ship, then Lowtax would come back from his non-drug-induced coma and start making changes and countermanding them up until he'd eventually slip off to do more drugs.
 
Last edited:
Something Awful said:
Yes, they have your IP address. Use a VPN, you should be doing that anyway. And they have to check accounts manually if they suspect someone is a perma-banned rereg, which they usually won't bother to do unless you post something crazy like "I don't think people with XY chromosomes can be women".
Click to expand...

I tried to ban evade and they caught me on my first post.

I m sure they have tool that checks ips and might even run a script that puts new posters against a list.
 
Something Awful said:
Dunno, but little known fact: you can put a fake name in the form when making a purchase. It seems there’s no system in place for actually comparing it against the name under which your credit/debit card is registered.
Click to expand...
Lastname and zip code are the only two checked in most processors. Credit cards are stolen all the time for that reason alone
 
John Hazbin said:
Thinking of paying 10 bucks to lurk and laugh since i was a big GOON back in the day.

Bad idea?
View attachment 8704997
Click to expand...
At this point the actually funny stuff, albeit unintentionally funny, gets posted here. Not sure what you’d be gaining versus reading this thread and Lowtax’s thread. SA these days is full of “dad gay, so what” monkeycheese interspersed with losers lording their oppression multipliers over the other goons lower on the progressive stack.
 
From a cartoon discussion thread:

Screenshot 2026-03-24 091441.png
 
Trollblade69 said:
From a cartoon discussion thread:

View attachment 8748622
Click to expand...
That's a post from 15 years ago, and it seems the poster was later banned for not respecting trans rights.

Screenshot 2026-03-24 at 19.42.34.jpg

Also pictured, some classic goon retorts. Not exactly witty, but the key is to just swarm the wrongthinker quickly and keep him busy until a friendly mod gets there.
 
Last edited:
Something Awful said:
That's a post from 15 years ago, and it seems the poster was later banned for not respecting trans rights.
Click to expand...
Though obviously he's still around, even if he's not posting, because this was in 2011 where fag drags were still socially acceptable. Transphobia would get hit with a perma these days, as we saw with that Fire Emblem post pages ago.
 
Screenshot 2026-03-28 at 12-43-45 Online Creators V you seem to know a lot about gooner drama....png
Dude thought he could just walk into a thread and not get ripped to shreds saying he likes pedophile games.

Also you can't see it, but his avatar is the catgirl from Dungeon Meshi. In case you need another giveaway that he's a fucking idiot.
 
Last edited:
The Hardest R said:
. SA these days is full of “dad gay, so what” monkeycheese interspersed with losers lording their oppression multipliers over the other goons lower on the progressive stack.
Click to expand...
It was sad to see this happen to goon communities as the sun was setting on SA. Everyone funny and interesting developed a life, forums in general lost popularity, and the only ones left logged in were puddinghead cretins and whiny perverts
Something Awful said:
Also pictured, some classic goon retorts. Not exactly witty, but the key is to just swarm the wrongthinker quickly and keep him busy until a friendly mod gets there.
Click to expand...
It's important to remember the very first redditors were GBS expats.
 
SwiftBucks said:
It was sad to see this happen to goon communities as the sun was setting on SA. Everyone funny and interesting developed a life, forums in general lost popularity, and the only ones left logged in were puddinghead cretins and whiny perverts
Click to expand...
it could have sunsetted into obscurity with little fanfare but the 2016 culture wars really just killed the website in the span of a few years. everybody i met on SA got banned and stopped associating with the website
 
SwiftBucks said:
It's important to remember the very first redditors were GBS expats.
Click to expand...

I'm an early SA goon and recall reddit being a pretty barren site around 2009 that was mostly fulla kids shitposting nonsense. After the Digg redesign everyone from there moved to reddit and i moreso consider those people the first real redditors.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom