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

  • 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
In what kind of world these fucking retards live that they think that winning a lawsuit is losing?
Meh what an idiot that rapist really is LOL*
*please fund the psycho ex legal feeds
Captura.JPG
 
blablabla said:
In what kind of world these fucking exceptional individuals live that they think that winning a lawsuit is losing?
Meh what an idiot that rapist really is LOL*
*please fund the psycho ex legal feedsView attachment 1225469
Click to expand...
It's usually this part of the story where the hotdog guy's skeletons fall out of the closet onto the goons, while hotdog guy wipes tears of mirth from his racist eyes with sweet, sweet goonbux.
 
I've never heard of this guy before, but what little has been said about him makes me guess that it's way more likely both sides are assholes

$7500 for a settlement is nothing compared to the costs he would've had to pay if the case kept going forward, it's much more likely that he saw a window to stop having to spend a good chunk of his time worrying about court and took it... and he probably knew the apology would have the opposite effect Zak S was hoping for anyway!

maybe Lowtax should use this court case in his next NordVPN ad
 
SomethingAwful has become an insufferable garbage forum for insufferable garbage people. Anything remotely funny gets shouted down by a chorus of worthless transvestite-cock-gobblers who spend their useless lives vomiting unfunny white-noise dreck all over the forums. The merest attempt to post something different or interesting sends them into a drool-mouthed frenzy of half-hearted outrage. The whole site needs to get infected with corona and die drowning in its own putrid juices.
 
repentance said:
A ridiculous amount of goons have been claiming to have the coof. It's an interesting measure of how quick they are to jump on any bandwagon which they think makes them special.
Click to expand...

When being a victim is the highest honor in the land, of course a bunch of virgoon spergs will pretend to have the beer flu.
 
Its a cultural thing for troons to adopt whatever the latest fad is, be it the chinese wuflu or a mental illness.
 
One thing that's come to interest me is the comparative usability and readability of Something Awful versus newer internet communities running on less buggy and antiquated forum architectures. Forum architectures that include the right tools and features, used in the right ways and made available to the right people, provide a much better posting and browsing experience than forums that have inadequate tools, or tools that are used in the wrong ways/by the wrong people, or no tools at all. To exemplify this, I'd like to provide some common examples of forum usage -- presented as "use cases" -- and how a a XenForo-powered forum can be used to achieve each use, versus how those uses are achieved on Something Awful.

Case 1: You want to make a post that includes media, such as goatse

  • XenForo: Click-and-drag or copy-and-paste to include the media as an attachment hosted permanently on the forum and embedded directly in the post.
  • Something Awful: Hotlink the media either directly from the source, from a reupload to Imgur, or from specialized goon projects such as Waffleimages. You have no control over these third-party hosts and if they ever change anything on their end at any time in the future, the media will vanish from your post. Something Awful does allow attachment uploads, but only for an additional fee and those attachments are hidden from unregistered users.

Case 2: You fuck up and doublepost

  • XenForo: Delete the doublepost. Staff can see and restore deleted posts but in this instance there's no reason for them to care.
  • Something Awful: Edit the doublepost to say "sorry guys" and let it shit up the thread forever.

Case 3: You see a post and would like to express your reaction to it, and you have nothing else to add

  • XenForo: Select the most relevant Reaction icon. The Reaction then appears at the bottom of the post and a list of all reactions can be pulled up, so I can see everybody who left Autistic reactions on this post and fume impotently at them on their profiles.
  • Something Awful: Make another post that quotes the original and adds either nothing else (if you like the post) or a rude smiley (if you dislike the post). There is a rule against this type of posting, but that rule can only be enforced by banning the poster; the post itself stays in the thread forever and after. Particularly good and/or popular posts often get emptyquoted so many times that the rest of the thread becomes completely unreadable.

Case 4: You see a post that is particularly bad and/or violates the rules and/or violates the law

  • XenForo: Report the post. Your report goes into a system specifically designed to make the report easy to track and process. Once the report is resolved, you receive a private notification to that effect. Filing bad reports can lead to your reporting privileges being revoked.
  • Something Awful: Pay $10 to get post-reporting privileges, then report the post. A jury-rigged posting bot makes a new thread in a hidden subforum that quotes the post and includes information about who made the post and who reported it. If the post you reported has already been reported by someone else -- or if someone reported a different post in the same thread -- then your report will fail to process and you will have to try again later when the existing report thread is moved out of the reports subforum. If the posting bot has been banned or probated as a joke, reporting a post will crash the entire forum. You have no way of knowing if or when a report is resolved except by F5'ing the thread and/or the Leper's Colony. Filing bad reports can lead to being banned which is the only way to revoke your reporting privileges, and you can re-buy your reporting privileges at any time.

Case 5: You have a genuine problem and need assistance from the staff

  • XenForo: Allows for specialized measures to contact staff, such as multi-person private conversations and subforums where threads are viewable only by staff and the OP.
  • Something Awful: Know somebody on staff, PM staff if you've paid for private messages, or post a thread in QCS and watch the peanut gallery rip it apart until the thread gets locked because "based on feedback I don't think there's actually a problem at all."

Case 6: You act like a 14-year-old autist with a boner and a deep-seated grudge against society

  • XenForo: Your posts can be edited, moved, merged, or deleted. Every post you make has a hidden edit history viewable by staff and your ability to edit/delete your own posts can be revoked. Your ability to report posts can be revoked. Your ability to add reactions can be revoked. Your ability to upload attachments can be revoked. Your ability to send PMs can be revoked. Your sockpuppet accounts can be merged into your main. The five dozen threads you posted in different subforums can be merged into one. Staff can change your name and/or avatar and your ability to change them back can be revoked. You can be banned from a specific thread, banned from a forum, or banned from the entire forum on a temporary or permanent basis. I am speaking only about tools whose existence I am aware of or can extrapolate. There are definitely more.
  • Something Awful: You can be banned from the entire forum on a temporary or permanent basis. There are vanishingly few other things that can be done to you that you can neither undo yourself nor circumvent.

I am using XenForo only as an example of forums software with which I am familiar as an end user. XenForo is far from a perfect forums software system, and a perfect forums software system will never exist. However, I think it's clear that better forums software -- with better and more powerful tools and better systems for managing access to those tools -- can create better forums as long as those tools are used properly. Good tools can still be used to run shitty forums, ResetERA being an example. However, SomethingAwful is a unique case in that it has almost no tools at all. If you're Something Awful staff, you have a hammer and a paywall and that's pretty much it. I can only imagine how much it must suck to try to run that place day to day.

Awhile back, Lowtax was promising to everybody who listened that the forums would soon be migrated to XenForo. He then hemmed and hawed and jerked off because he was certain that XenForo was about to be updated to a newer version and that there was no point in migrating the forums to new architecture if he'd then have to run an upgrade immediately. Eventually he took all the money that had been set aside for upgrading the forums and spent it on pies, and no plans to upgrade the forums have been disclosed since then.

When I joined the Kiwi Farms, I thus watched with some interest when Null announced that he was going to take down the forums for a bit and upgrade them to a newer version of XenForo. To my amusement, the upgrade completed within a few hours and the forums came back up with almost no visible glitches. Upgrading the forums software was in no way the apocalypse scenario that Richard made it out to be.
 
Fucking hell, I knew that registering and the archive were paywalled but actual standard forum functions are as well? That should be a shitpost instead of reality.
 
Leonard Helplessness said:
One thing that's come to interest me is the comparative usability and readability of Something Awful versus newer internet communities running on less buggy and antiquated forum architectures. Forum architectures that include the right tools and features, used in the right ways and made available to the right people, provide a much better posting and browsing experience than forums that have inadequate tools, or tools that are used in the wrong ways/by the wrong people, or no tools at all. To exemplify this, I'd like to provide some common examples of forum usage -- presented as "use cases" -- and how a a XenForo-powered forum can be used to achieve each use, versus how those uses are achieved on Something Awful.

Case 1: You want to make a post that includes media, such as goatse

  • XenForo: Click-and-drag or copy-and-paste to include the media as an attachment hosted permanently on the forum and embedded directly in the post.
  • Something Awful: Hotlink the media either directly from the source, from a reupload to Imgur, or from specialized goon projects such as Waffleimages. You have no control over these third-party hosts and if they ever change anything on their end at any time in the future, the media will vanish from your post. Something Awful does allow attachment uploads, but only for an additional fee and those attachments are hidden from unregistered users.

Case 2: You fuck up and doublepost

  • XenForo: Delete the doublepost. Staff can see and restore deleted posts but in this instance there's no reason for them to care.
  • Something Awful: Edit the doublepost to say "sorry guys" and let it shit up the thread forever.

Case 3: You see a post and would like to express your reaction to it, and you have nothing else to add

  • XenForo: Select the most relevant Reaction icon. The Reaction then appears at the bottom of the post and a list of all reactions can be pulled up, so I can see everybody who left Autistic reactions on this post and fume impotently at them on their profiles.
  • Something Awful: Make another post that quotes the original and adds either nothing else (if you like the post) or a rude smiley (if you dislike the post). There is a rule against this type of posting, but that rule can only be enforced by banning the poster; the post itself stays in the thread forever and after. Particularly good and/or popular posts often get emptyquoted so many times that the rest of the thread becomes completely unreadable.

Case 4: You see a post that is particularly bad and/or violates the rules and/or violates the law

  • XenForo: Report the post. Your report goes into a system specifically designed to make the report easy to track and process. Once the report is resolved, you receive a private notification to that effect. Filing bad reports can lead to your reporting privileges being revoked.
  • Something Awful: Pay $10 to get post-reporting privileges, then report the post. A jury-rigged posting bot makes a new thread in a hidden subforum that quotes the post and includes information about who made the post and who reported it. If the post you reported has already been reported by someone else -- or if someone reported a different post in the same thread -- then your report will fail to process and you will have to try again later when the existing report thread is moved out of the reports subforum. If the posting bot has been banned or probated as a joke, reporting a post will crash the entire forum. You have no way of knowing if or when a report is resolved except by F5'ing the thread and/or the Leper's Colony. Filing bad reports can lead to being banned which is the only way to revoke your reporting privileges, and you can re-buy your reporting privileges at any time.

Case 5: You have a genuine problem and need assistance from the staff

  • XenForo: Allows for specialized measures to contact staff, such as multi-person private conversations and subforums where threads are viewable only by staff and the OP.
  • Something Awful: Know somebody on staff, PM staff if you've paid for private messages, or post a thread in QCS and watch the peanut gallery rip it apart until the thread gets locked because "based on feedback I don't think there's actually a problem at all."

Case 6: You act like a 14-year-old autist with a boner and a deep-seated grudge against society

  • XenForo: Your posts can be edited, moved, merged, or deleted. Every post you make has a hidden edit history viewable by staff and your ability to edit/delete your own posts can be revoked. Your ability to report posts can be revoked. Your ability to add reactions can be revoked. Your ability to upload attachments can be revoked. Your ability to send PMs can be revoked. Your sockpuppet accounts can be merged into your main. The five dozen threads you posted in different subforums can be merged into one. Staff can change your name and/or avatar and your ability to change them back can be revoked. You can be banned from a specific thread, banned from a forum, or banned from the entire forum on a temporary or permanent basis. I am speaking only about tools whose existence I am aware of or can extrapolate. There are definitely more.
  • Something Awful: You can be banned from the entire forum on a temporary or permanent basis. There are vanishingly few other things that can be done to you that you can neither undo yourself nor circumvent.

I am using XenForo only as an example of forums software with which I am familiar as an end user. XenForo is far from a perfect forums software system, and a perfect forums software system will never exist. However, I think it's clear that better forums software -- with better and more powerful tools and better systems for managing access to those tools -- can create better forums as long as those tools are used properly. Good tools can still be used to run shitty forums, ResetERA being an example. However, SomethingAwful is a unique case in that it has almost no tools at all. If you're Something Awful staff, you have a hammer and a paywall and that's pretty much it. I can only imagine how much it must suck to try to run that place day to day.

Awhile back, Lowtax was promising to everybody who listened that the forums would soon be migrated to XenForo. He then hemmed and hawed and jerked off because he was certain that XenForo was about to be updated to a newer version and that there was no point in migrating the forums to new architecture if he'd then have to run an upgrade immediately. Eventually he took all the money that had been set aside for upgrading the forums and spent it on pies, and no plans to upgrade the forums have been disclosed since then.

When I joined the Kiwi Farms, I thus watched with some interest when Null announced that he was going to take down the forums for a bit and upgrade them to a newer version of XenForo. To my amusement, the upgrade completed within a few hours and the forums came back up with almost no visible glitches. Upgrading the forums software was in no way the apocalypse scenario that Richard made it out to be.
Click to expand...
Even if SA was migrated to xenforo post ratings would never be enabled because goons wouldn’t be able to take their posts getting voted dumb.
 
Beavis said:
Even if SA was migrated to xenforo post ratings would never be enabled because goons wouldn’t be able to take their posts getting voted dumb.
Click to expand...
I’m sure the mods would love to have that feature, it would make it possible to weed out wrongthink by banning everyone who reacts to a post in an unacceptable fashion. Even easier than reading posts, and you know how goons hate effort!
 
Vapewizard said:
Fucking hell, I knew that registering and the archive were paywalled but actual standard forum functions are as well? That should be a shitpost instead of reality.
Click to expand...
Leonard Helplessness said:
Viewing a user's post history or using the search function are also paywalled, and the search feature is also broken.
Click to expand...
Yep. It's called a "Platinum Upgrade," and as previously mentioned it grants you amazing features such as being able to search, see post histories, and report naughty users. It also let's you upload attachments (cause there ain't nothing on SA Eraserhead can't paywall).

Just for fun, if you decided to huff draino and fully deck out an SA account with all the bells and whistles, you'd be spending:

$9.95 for the base account
$9.95 for platinum
$9.95 for your broken archives access
$5.00 for an avatar and a title
$4.95 for no ads cause fuck it. we love giving lowtax money!

That's $39.80 straight to Rich's bank account. You've just paid for over a third of his next ice cream cake. And that's terrible.

Also, the store page still lists an upgrade you can buy just for FYAD, despite the fact that FYAD is dead. lol
 
An Account said:
Yep. It's called a "Platinum Upgrade," and as previously mentioned it grants you amazing features such as being able to search, see post histories, and report naughty users. It also let's you upload attachments (cause there ain't nothing on SA Eraserhead can't paywall).

Just for fun, if you decided to huff draino and fully deck out an SA account with all the bells and whistles, you'd be spending:

$9.95 for the base account
$9.95 for platinum
$9.95 for your broken archives access
$5.00 for an avatar and a title
$4.95 for no ads cause fuck it. we love giving lowtax money!

That's $39.80 straight to Rich's bank account. You've just paid for over a third of his next ice cream cake. And that's terrible.

Also, the store page still lists an upgrade you can buy just for FYAD, despite the fact that FYAD is dead. lol
Click to expand...
Don’t forget the up charge for private messages!
 
My take: there is nothing really wrong with the SA forums software. It's antiquated and apparently difficult to modify without breaking random shit, but it doesn't matter. The problem is entirely the broke-brained management/mods, not the software. Being able to delete double-posts or upvote posts wouldn't change anything. In fact, lowtax's resistance to any kind of voting system is, imo, his singular good management decision. Now, the system here is more or less fine, but if posts actually get sorted/hidden based on votes, like on fucking reddit, it encourages hivemind groupthink like nothing else and destroys any kind of real discussion and community.
 
The forum software is basically garbage, but that alone isn't a big deal. It works, in that you can write a thing and other people can read it. I'd say the garbage software is more of a symptom, the disease is lazy incompetence, and the lazy incompetence is what's really wrecked everything. It's why shit mods were allowed to do their thing, why unpaid "developers" managed to wreck the forums even worse, etc.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom