User:Henry W. Schmitt/gm

General [M]ayhem, nicknamed by its users Genmay or the "[M]", is an Internet forum containing general discussion forums; its title aptly describing the character of these discussions. Genmay is currently one of the largest message boards on the Internet, with over 20,000,000 posts despite until recently having less than 40,000 members.

History Of General Mayhem
The current General [M]ayhem was founded after the original HardOCP sub-forum was spontaneously shut down by its owner, Kyle Bennett.

Three forum members jumped on the idea of creating a new forum for the displaced community. On July 4th 2002, genmay.com was registered and that same day a vBulletin based forum was launched. The control of the forum currently rests in the hands of M|22 (Mister Two) and Sanjay.

The site is now owned and operated under the name General [M]ayhem, LLC the, of which Sanjay holds a majority interest and M|22 the remaining minority interest. Genmay is now located on several colocated optimized servers.

Community
General Mayhem is administrated by its principle backers - M|22 and Sanjay. Recently however a third administrator has been added to develop a new store and payment system as well as perform general forum maintenance. The forum is moderated by dozens of "super moderators", that is moderators who can moderate all forums and ban any user he or she sees fit. The remainder is made up of many more "forum moderators", those assigned to specific forums and do not have the ability to ban users.

Currently any member is able to perform many actions any other other member through a unique business model which generates income for the forum and culls the obnoxious at the same time. A "donation" system was implemented, allowing automated changes of usernames, thread subject lines, user titles, user avatars, along with the ability to ban and other features typically reserved to moderators and administrators.

The General [M]ayhem community is very dedicated, known to write programs and create web services such as image hosting, games , and IRC servers exclusively for Genmay members. Also notable is the fact that the website has no advertising, being able to maintain itself with donations alone.

Notable Pranks
On February 20, 2005, personal details from Paris Hilton's T-Mobile account surfaced on the forum.

In the Summer of 2005, General Mayhem members started a rumor that Christopher Walken would run for president in 2008. A website, Walken 2008, was later created to ensure the rumor was more believable, to encourage and gather media coverage from well-respected news stations. The rumor was finally shot down when Walken's publicist, Mara Buxbaum, reported that it was a hoax. The prank was mentioned when Mr. Walken was interviewed on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

Forums
The discussion board is divided into a dozen or so sub-forums; some, including the website's namesake, have nearly no rules whilst the majority are very strict and do not allow the shenanigans generally accepted in the main forum.

Network forums
In 2007 Sanjay started purchasing various other forums, including the ABXZONE.com computer discussion forums, spiceforums.com, forumbabes.com, and numberous other entertainment related message boards. Until rather recently when new rules were introduced put in place for the Genmay.com forums, a link was provided for "Free forums". The user database for the network forums and Genmay were merged so a member of one network could sign in to all other forums included what Sanjay dubs "The CrowdGather Network" of forums. As a result of the database merge, each forum now boasts more than 150,000 members, although posting habits suggest many of these accounts are dormant.