- Joined
- Sep 21, 2014
I think Era posters give them a run for their money.
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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I think Era posters give them a run for their money.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
I like how it's painfully obvious from the leak that they're furiously F5'ing this thread. Because Internet stuff matters obviously. Hi guys! Maybe turn the computer off and go outside for a while. Or maybe try not acting like some always-online spastics that think anything on SA actually matters beyond making some drunk addict yokel in Missura money. Some white cishet yokel that probably abused both of his ex-wives and kids to some degree and used to be a convinced libertarian until he found out about e-begging. You do all the free work you do to keep that guy afloat, and for nothing else and he doesn't even give a shit about any single one of you or what you do on his forums. I dunno.
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- Joined
- Sep 21, 2014
Just saw this truth bomb I.N.R.I. dropped in QCS
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- Joined
- Jan 17, 2020
people always fall for trolls, even when the troll tells them exactly what they're gonna do.
Learned Hand
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2020
Lorepost ~ Goon Discord Network: The Rise and Fall
The Rise
The Goon Discord Network is probably the only "sanctioned" offsite ever by SA and lowtax specifically. It was founded in 2015, principally to leverage the number of active goons foregoing forum posting to create their own dedicated communities and tether them all together. The GDN was controlled by a bot called authbot, which was popular because it could automatically verify which discord users had an active SA account, and a ban on one GDN server because of bad behavior or because of an SA siteban could be filtered down to all the connected servers.
The primary progenitors of the GDN were Tempus Thales (TT) and IAmKale. They later came to Kimsemus to manage most of the community and settle what the actual rules would be, and hoped he would attract some of the more fringe/fragmented groups at the same time. The initial rule structure essentially allowed each GDN server to moderate as they saw fit, while the main Something Awful Discord server (3000+ users) would be more or less hands-off, as kind of a free speech zone. This, of course, was comically optimistic.
Since this predated much of the political and troon drama on SA, the original moderator team was pretty diverse: a mix of SA mods, users, BMW/WTT members, and even some prominent posters from forums like TGRS. For awhile, things were good. TaylorSwift (the most engaged moderator), and by proxy TT actually managed to keep discussion open and stamp out rabble for awhile. But trouble was brewing, even if most people didn't know it. Most people expected an honest deal from TT, but that wasn't what they were getting. TT wasn't stupid though, and kept most things behind closed doors.
And so it was, for a time. At this point, there were 200 discord servers on the network with tens of thousands of users. But, as you might have guessed, troons ruin everything.
The Fall
Late in 2018, TT plugged Lowtax's discord server into the GDN, and began leaning on people hard to join it and participate. This irked a lot of users, because despite wanting to hang out with other goons, few of them actually liked lowtax at all. Most people discovered this because GDN had a never used ping feature, which raised a few obvious questions around what else the bot may be able to do. Some alleged the bot may even be used for spying, which TT/Kale denied. Despite suspicion, they never released the source code for the bot -- yet.
Early in March of 2019, with politics at a fevered pitch, goons began to post about killing themselves. Later, in a rare rally of support for their own, TT decided to plug in a "cry for help" function on the GDN, where someone could reach out to other goons if they were feeling brave and deciding to off themselves.
Now, this doesn't seem like a bad idea, except it exposed a flaw in the bot: joining that role, because of mismanaged bot permissions, also gave access to the admin-only channel. Only a select few handpicked conspirators, assigned a hidden role via the GDNbot, could do so.
It would be discovered that TT, Kale, Serious Overchill (SRSOC) founder FAT32 and a handful of others essentially used this channel as their gestapo channel, to essentially set up other people for character assassination and banning. You could surmise the common reason why: they didn't like their real world politics, which had nothing to do with GDN.
TaylorSwift, as the defacto head of BMW, was the first they appeared to plot against:
The only thing holding them back at that point was that they couldn't quite get their global ban system working. They did soon after this though, and once they were sure it could be a total purge, Taylor was banned, not because he didn't do his job as moderator (he was, by all accounts, the most active one on the server) but because his opinions weren't in lockstep with the new trans agenda FAT32 and others were pushing.
With Taylor gone, Kimsemus had to go next, as he was vocally outraged in public about the clamp on free speech. From what I saw, he quoted more than once the original "rules" of the GDN network and SA Discord, demanding an open space for discussion. TT publicly supported him, but in the private "admin" channel:
The "small problem" left behind were other posters that had a non-conforming political bend. Again, not rabble rowsers, not people who flooded the discords or caused problems, but people expressing opinions they didn't like.
Ironically, this ended up having a catastrophic effect. Rounding up an executing anyone they didn't agree with actually left the server with something of an activity problem. Posting and activity decreased dramatically. To give you context, this was around the time of the Conan Exiles drama from my previous lorepost, and TT goes in on Kimsemus in a screenshot TT posts in his secret channel, angry that -- BMW wasn't PVPing on behalf of a Discord server instead of their community group:
It's worth noting that TT, Kale, and FAT32 had all also shared almost all their PII in this channel. Names, phone numbers, e-mails, etc. I believe there is an old post in this very thread that touches on that.
THE FALL: REVENGENCE
Rather than just admit they messed up a role on the bot -- TT and Kale go into overdrive. They blame not the bot for the channel leak, but claim BMW members had somehow "hacked" the bot and spilled all the channel info.
Again -- there was no hack. It was literally just a mis-programmed role in the bot, and they knew it:
Kale immediately began trying to figure out what they did wrong, but this didn't stop the lies. Realizing if people ever questioned the bot, they would get rid of it. Why they didn't want this would become apparent soon, but in the meantime, with all the troublemakers gone, they needed a new scapegoat, so they blamed FAT32 for...somehow helping BMW hack the bot...?
The result? FAT32 is banned from the very trans community he started, SRSOC, by his fellow admin, who was trying to get rid of him anyway, for not being COMPLETELY behind the most radical elements of their trans agenda:
Knowing the reality of the situation, they then began purging all the moderator logs from SRSOC anyway:
When questioned, instead of admitting what they also knew to be true, and needed the excuse to execute a problematic founder, they also blamed BMW:
In their desperation to figure out how this happened, they turned back to Kimsemus, to figure out what REALLY happened. TT posted this explanation publicly:
None of this post was strictly true, as it turns out. Through either just sheer bad luck for Kale and TT, or some kind of goonie intervention, Kimsemus had been patching things up with BMW, whom he had split with for some time. When they welcomed him back, apparently, they showed him what had really been going on. Kimsemus had no knowledge of the secret channel, no knowledge of the coordinated hits on his friends, and had trusted what TT was telling him. We know this because BMW put together a PDF document outlining their evidence on what happened, titled wideboys.pdf. They laid out the entire case for what happened, and then dumped it into the world for anyone to see. Their evidence was damning.
Kimsemus, in public, on the main SA Discord server, dropped a bomb:
In response to someone asking if the bot was safe to use, Kimsemus said:
TT didn't respond for over an hour, and banned Kimsemus from the entire network and purged all of his posts, but by then it was too late. Before TT could act, Kimsemus posted the logging script TT had inserted into the bot that allowed him access to every channel, on every server, that GDN was on. All 200. Public or private channels. Everything. My belief was that once BMW all put their heads together and pieced all the info, what was going on was clear. BMW forming VOLTRON and combining their powers, as it turned out, appeared to be as horrifying to the troon agenda as they always said it would be. Their entire intelligence gathering apparatus had been destroyed -- at the same time staff members were being purged from SA and throwing the site into chaos. Without doing anything, once again, it seemed invisible internet nazis had struck a mortal blow.
TT actually admitted this backdoor existed in a moment of anger, but it didn't come to light until he began doing damage control on the SA thread:
It wasn't long after until the accusations began piling in -- TT talking in channels he shouldn't have had access to via the bot, knowing things he shouldn't have, etc. The secret was out. Kale finally posted an edited version of the bot source code, but the truth was already there.
GDN was never about community. It was about control. It was about making sure the right kind of opinions were allowed, and the others removed.
It's old ground at this point, but once again, goons ended up impaling themselves on their own swords, trying to root out nazi posters that don't exist. GDN fell off the map. Almost all active servers jettisoned the bot -- 130 in the first week. The SA Discord is a ghost town.
And thus, my friends, the rise and fall of the Goon Discord Network.
The Rise
The Goon Discord Network is probably the only "sanctioned" offsite ever by SA and lowtax specifically. It was founded in 2015, principally to leverage the number of active goons foregoing forum posting to create their own dedicated communities and tether them all together. The GDN was controlled by a bot called authbot, which was popular because it could automatically verify which discord users had an active SA account, and a ban on one GDN server because of bad behavior or because of an SA siteban could be filtered down to all the connected servers.
The primary progenitors of the GDN were Tempus Thales (TT) and IAmKale. They later came to Kimsemus to manage most of the community and settle what the actual rules would be, and hoped he would attract some of the more fringe/fragmented groups at the same time. The initial rule structure essentially allowed each GDN server to moderate as they saw fit, while the main Something Awful Discord server (3000+ users) would be more or less hands-off, as kind of a free speech zone. This, of course, was comically optimistic.
Since this predated much of the political and troon drama on SA, the original moderator team was pretty diverse: a mix of SA mods, users, BMW/WTT members, and even some prominent posters from forums like TGRS. For awhile, things were good. TaylorSwift (the most engaged moderator), and by proxy TT actually managed to keep discussion open and stamp out rabble for awhile. But trouble was brewing, even if most people didn't know it. Most people expected an honest deal from TT, but that wasn't what they were getting. TT wasn't stupid though, and kept most things behind closed doors.
And so it was, for a time. At this point, there were 200 discord servers on the network with tens of thousands of users. But, as you might have guessed, troons ruin everything.
The Fall
Late in 2018, TT plugged Lowtax's discord server into the GDN, and began leaning on people hard to join it and participate. This irked a lot of users, because despite wanting to hang out with other goons, few of them actually liked lowtax at all. Most people discovered this because GDN had a never used ping feature, which raised a few obvious questions around what else the bot may be able to do. Some alleged the bot may even be used for spying, which TT/Kale denied. Despite suspicion, they never released the source code for the bot -- yet.
Early in March of 2019, with politics at a fevered pitch, goons began to post about killing themselves. Later, in a rare rally of support for their own, TT decided to plug in a "cry for help" function on the GDN, where someone could reach out to other goons if they were feeling brave and deciding to off themselves.
Now, this doesn't seem like a bad idea, except it exposed a flaw in the bot: joining that role, because of mismanaged bot permissions, also gave access to the admin-only channel. Only a select few handpicked conspirators, assigned a hidden role via the GDNbot, could do so.
It would be discovered that TT, Kale, Serious Overchill (SRSOC) founder FAT32 and a handful of others essentially used this channel as their gestapo channel, to essentially set up other people for character assassination and banning. You could surmise the common reason why: they didn't like their real world politics, which had nothing to do with GDN.
TaylorSwift, as the defacto head of BMW, was the first they appeared to plot against:
The only thing holding them back at that point was that they couldn't quite get their global ban system working. They did soon after this though, and once they were sure it could be a total purge, Taylor was banned, not because he didn't do his job as moderator (he was, by all accounts, the most active one on the server) but because his opinions weren't in lockstep with the new trans agenda FAT32 and others were pushing.
With Taylor gone, Kimsemus had to go next, as he was vocally outraged in public about the clamp on free speech. From what I saw, he quoted more than once the original "rules" of the GDN network and SA Discord, demanding an open space for discussion. TT publicly supported him, but in the private "admin" channel:
The "small problem" left behind were other posters that had a non-conforming political bend. Again, not rabble rowsers, not people who flooded the discords or caused problems, but people expressing opinions they didn't like.
Ironically, this ended up having a catastrophic effect. Rounding up an executing anyone they didn't agree with actually left the server with something of an activity problem. Posting and activity decreased dramatically. To give you context, this was around the time of the Conan Exiles drama from my previous lorepost, and TT goes in on Kimsemus in a screenshot TT posts in his secret channel, angry that -- BMW wasn't PVPing on behalf of a Discord server instead of their community group:
It's worth noting that TT, Kale, and FAT32 had all also shared almost all their PII in this channel. Names, phone numbers, e-mails, etc. I believe there is an old post in this very thread that touches on that.
THE FALL: REVENGENCE
Rather than just admit they messed up a role on the bot -- TT and Kale go into overdrive. They blame not the bot for the channel leak, but claim BMW members had somehow "hacked" the bot and spilled all the channel info.
Again -- there was no hack. It was literally just a mis-programmed role in the bot, and they knew it:
Kale immediately began trying to figure out what they did wrong, but this didn't stop the lies. Realizing if people ever questioned the bot, they would get rid of it. Why they didn't want this would become apparent soon, but in the meantime, with all the troublemakers gone, they needed a new scapegoat, so they blamed FAT32 for...somehow helping BMW hack the bot...?
The result? FAT32 is banned from the very trans community he started, SRSOC, by his fellow admin, who was trying to get rid of him anyway, for not being COMPLETELY behind the most radical elements of their trans agenda:
Knowing the reality of the situation, they then began purging all the moderator logs from SRSOC anyway:
When questioned, instead of admitting what they also knew to be true, and needed the excuse to execute a problematic founder, they also blamed BMW:
In their desperation to figure out how this happened, they turned back to Kimsemus, to figure out what REALLY happened. TT posted this explanation publicly:
None of this post was strictly true, as it turns out. Through either just sheer bad luck for Kale and TT, or some kind of goonie intervention, Kimsemus had been patching things up with BMW, whom he had split with for some time. When they welcomed him back, apparently, they showed him what had really been going on. Kimsemus had no knowledge of the secret channel, no knowledge of the coordinated hits on his friends, and had trusted what TT was telling him. We know this because BMW put together a PDF document outlining their evidence on what happened, titled wideboys.pdf. They laid out the entire case for what happened, and then dumped it into the world for anyone to see. Their evidence was damning.
Kimsemus, in public, on the main SA Discord server, dropped a bomb:
In response to someone asking if the bot was safe to use, Kimsemus said:
TT didn't respond for over an hour, and banned Kimsemus from the entire network and purged all of his posts, but by then it was too late. Before TT could act, Kimsemus posted the logging script TT had inserted into the bot that allowed him access to every channel, on every server, that GDN was on. All 200. Public or private channels. Everything. My belief was that once BMW all put their heads together and pieced all the info, what was going on was clear. BMW forming VOLTRON and combining their powers, as it turned out, appeared to be as horrifying to the troon agenda as they always said it would be. Their entire intelligence gathering apparatus had been destroyed -- at the same time staff members were being purged from SA and throwing the site into chaos. Without doing anything, once again, it seemed invisible internet nazis had struck a mortal blow.
TT actually admitted this backdoor existed in a moment of anger, but it didn't come to light until he began doing damage control on the SA thread:
It wasn't long after until the accusations began piling in -- TT talking in channels he shouldn't have had access to via the bot, knowing things he shouldn't have, etc. The secret was out. Kale finally posted an edited version of the bot source code, but the truth was already there.
GDN was never about community. It was about control. It was about making sure the right kind of opinions were allowed, and the others removed.
It's old ground at this point, but once again, goons ended up impaling themselves on their own swords, trying to root out nazi posters that don't exist. GDN fell off the map. Almost all active servers jettisoned the bot -- 130 in the first week. The SA Discord is a ghost town.
And thus, my friends, the rise and fall of the Goon Discord Network.
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Leonard Helplessness
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2018
I got on goon IRC once and everybody was obsessing over their favorite “tiny horses” because some op had set up an autokick that activated on any mention of anything directly MLP-related. Simpler times.
Also, that’s a good fuckin lorepost.
Learned Hand
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2020
BMW is one of the most enduring goon splinters that spun off from the MMO HMO/Games forums and I think they've stayed popular through having fun and not thought policing.
The name comes from something that happened in Rust, the original goon city was named Detroit, so the first PVP clan became General Motors. When they merged all the PVP orientated goons together to begin raiding public servers, they adopted the BMW name.
For most people on SA, BMW is a synonym with the alt-right/nazi bogeyman to be used as a scapegoat that troons have desperately tried to shut down. The drama around PPJ and the mod meltdown the last few months all began over their membership on BMW's discord.
My personal fondest memory of them was them building this on the goon rust server:
They'd also all pile into servers and build these absolutely massive towers they called dreadforts that I think discouraged others from raiding by sheer size/disconnecting people with bad internet as soon as it rendered.
- Joined
- Jan 11, 2017
Boring autistic bullshit that nobody cares about.
- Joined
- Aug 25, 2017
Do you know where you are?
- Joined
- Jan 11, 2017
That's fair, but there are limits, and huge screeds about the dull slapfights of a bunch of IRC faggots I've never heard of are just too far.
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2016
Rust was a fun game
- Joined
- Feb 11, 2017
I dunno, I found the BMW stuff interesting. I think they took down a lot of their public facing stuff after appearing in this thread to prevent a flood of internet randos though.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
now imagine they'd actually invest all that energy to play online stasi into actually improving something in their life or learning a skill.
Trip Chesterton III
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 27, 2019
They definitely provided some interesting content for sure, but I know personally, that if I touched as much poop as they have I would have lost my mind, so I hope they are doing okay psychologically 
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
I mean, case in point, I keep posting openly in this thread letting everyone know that Cascade beta is the deep-embed account of the autistic shit-posting illuminati, but not only do the communities we use that account to destroy fail to ban or meaningfully punish a user that aggressively shit-stirs, but they actively defend him by making "B*rney" a bannable slur.
- Joined
- Jan 20, 2015
It was fun back in 2014 when it was just a poorly made shitpost of a game but became boring as fuck once they started trying to make it into an actual game
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- Joined
- Jan 9, 2020
Rude
Im doing fine, thanks. Thriving in fact!They definitely provided some interesting content for sure, but I know personally, that if I touched as much poop as they have I would have lost my mind, so I hope they are doing okay psychologically
Nope, everythings still live. We did change domains tho.
Almost all of us are students or have careers, dont fall for memes friend!
- Joined
- Sep 21, 2014