User talk:Quirex/SA sourced

Something Awful, often abbreviated to SA, is a comedy website housing a wide variety of content, including instant messaging pranks, digitally edited pictures, and humorous media reviews. The site also includes one of the largest forums on the Internet. The site and forums have had a part in the creation and promotion of several Internet phenomena.

History
Something Awful was created by Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka, who remains in control of the site despite the proliferation of other contributing writers and administrators.

Several sponsors, including GameFan and eFront, failed to compensate Kyanka as promised for advertising on the site.

In 2001, the site began charging a one-time fee (currently US$9.95) for forum access. Currently, non-members can view the forums with additional advertising, but are not able to post messages or threads. The site and forums draw continuous income from fees for new accounts, forum upgrades such as custom avatars, and merchandise sales.

Content
The content of the site consists of Comedic writings and internet pranks. Among the site's many writers and contributors, some of the most notable are:


 * Richard Kyanka. The creator of Something Awful.
 * Dr. David Thorpe. Writes the "Your Band Sucks" section, and collaborates with Zack Parsons on "Fashion SWAT." Thorpe has appeared on behalf of Something Awful on Attack of the Show!, giving a tongue-in-cheek description of the site.

Forums
Something Awful is particularly well-known for its forums, which have helped to create or perpetuate several Internet memes, such as All your base are belong to us and Tourist guy.

Pranks
The Something Awful community has been responsible for many pranks. One of the more infamous ones involved the Entertainment Weekly "Entertainer of the Year" contest, in which votes are submitted (online or off) for their favorite entertainer. Allegedly, Goons quickly found a weakness in the voting system, and scripts were written to vote for Lowtax dozens of times per second, thus ensuring his victory. Lowtax was quickly disqualified when Entertainment Weekly found that many of the votes were coming from very few IP addresses. Lowtax did, however, get his name mentioned in the magazine.

Hurricane Katrina-PayPal conflict
Since the website's servers were located in New Orleans, the site temporarily went offline during the flooding from Hurricane Katrina. After the site was brought to a semi-functional state, Kyanka set up a link to a PayPal account where people could donate money to the survivors of the hurricane via the Red Cross. Kyanka put in $3,000 of his own money, and promised to give some free merchandise to anyone who donated more than $10.

In under half a day, visitors helped to raise $27,695.41 US before PayPal froze the account under suspicions of fraud; automated messages informed that there had been "more than one report of suspicious behavior from your buyers." PayPal stated that they would unfreeze the account once it was provided with proof of shipping from aggrieved buyers. Due to the nature of the collection, there were no actual "buyers", and it was impossible to provide proof of shipping for an intangible good such as a donation. Eventually, Kyanka contacted a customer service representative over the phone, and asked to have PayPal donate all of the money to the Red Cross. However, he was told that PayPal could only give the money to United Way; Kyanka initially agreed, but after receiving several emails from readers detailing alleged corruption and inefficiency within United Way, he changed his mind and told PayPal to refund all of the money to the individual donors. PayPal refunded the money, but did not refund exchange and handling fees for international donors.

eBaum's World controversy
SA content has reappeared, rebranded, on eBaum's World, one of several incidents of plagiarism and copyright infringement by eBaum's. In late 2005, Lowtax sent numerous requests via email to have Eric Bauman remove content from the eBaum's World site. After these requests failed, Lowtax asked forum members who have produced content rebranded by eBaum's to invade the eBaum's World forums in order to personally request that their content be removed, flooding the EBW forum and crashing their system. Shortly thereafter, eBaum's World retaliated by adding code to their front page that called files from Something Awful's servers, essentially engaging in inline linking, resulting in a denial-of-service attack against the Awful Forums.

SPEWS Controversy
On July 20, 2003, the spam filtering organization Spam Prevention Early Warning System (SPEWS) added an entire class B-subnet with the Cogent ISP to their spammer list.