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The Something Awful Forums (usually abbreviated as the SA Forums) is a limited-access highly-modified message board system on the popular humor website Something Awful, with a huge userbase (the 30,000 member mark was reached mid-April, 2004, and reached 43,500 by the end of August). The forums are ranked (as of August 2004) as the 6th most popular on the net, in spite of a registration fee being charged for access. . People who frequent the Something Awful Forums call themselves "SA Goons," or simply "goons." The forums reflect the website in that the main currency is comedy and irreverence. Sarcasm, revenge and laughing at overly emotional people are the most popular forms of entertainment, although goons are still human and are not afraid to criticize people for being too mean. The surreal humour of most front page stories is reflected in the "FYAD" forum described below.
There is a small group of veteran banned users who hold a grudge against the administrators of the forums and think that power is too often abused, while others believe the forums are deftly moderated. The forums are renowned for this same moderation which keeps them largely troll-free and are a haven for many different types of people who share a similar sense of humor. Although the community is international, it is mostly comprised of American males in the teen to 20s age range.
The entire forum contains several subforums dedicated to, among other things, goon-created art, (successfully moderated and flame-free) political discussion, consumer deals, trading, sports and computers. The main difference between these forums and other message boards dedicated to similar purposes is that with such a large userbase none of the forums are ever "dead" and all have a topic turnover rate, even though oftentimes controversial issues or things particularly pleasing to the goon mind will span hundreds of posts.
While a selection of forums is usually available for read-only anonymous browsing, it costs $10 to register a full account; this money goes directly to the webmaster, Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka, who currently makes a living from administering the forums. Many other forum features also cost $5 or $10 each, such as gaining permission to search the forums, putting an image and custom text under your or someone else's username (often to demean them). These fees help pay for the costs of the servers which are naturally under large amounts of strain and transfer massive amounts of bandwidth, with anywhere from one to three thousand people logged onto the forums at any given time.
Many of the Photoshops that circulate the web are created by members of this forum, and many of the Internet fads such as All Your Base are accelerated and given an exponentially larger audience by goons. These often get old at the SAF before they hit the 'mainstream' and are looked down upon thereafter.
General Bullshit, almost always abbreviated to "GBS" to save time typing and to be less offensive, is very similar to any of the "Off Topic" forums found on virtually every message board system on the Web. GBS frequents can start a thread on anything, usually without being dismissed by the rest of the community. As well as the conglomeration of news and links found on most "Off Topic" boards, GBS is also host to many non-official Photoshop competitions and improvisational joke threads.
Fuck You And Die, almost always abbreviated to "FYAD" for the same reasons as described with GBS, is unique to Something Awful. In FYAD, most all posts are nonsensical and mock the common, teenage Internet user, either directly or indirectly. Chatspeak and message board jokes are taken to ridiculous extremes, and catchphrases are frequently invented, some of which are described in the "Common Abbreviations and Phrases" section below. Something Awful's weekly Weekend Web articles, a compilation of asinine or otherwise humorous things said on message boards, are put together in FYAD.
FYAD has been described as being simultaneously the least intelligent, as well as the most intelligent forum of all of the Something Awful Forums. This peculiar designation comes from the unending parody that takes place within; the parody of other, more juvenile BBS services is so ubiquitous and unending that FYAD's own status as a purely parody-based forum becomes blurred, eliminating the distinction between parody and actual stupidity. Thus, from this confusion come many who do not understand what FYAD is actually "about", and such people either try to combat their own mockery, or act aloof in the face of such mockery. Many posters who have confined themselves to the other forums of Something Awful have decried FYAD as being childish and superficial, either because of personal taste, their own agressive (or, perhaps, masochistic) disposition, or ignorance. These people are said to not "get" FYAD, and are told, without fail, to leave. In this sense, FYAD is a masquerade of gigantic proportions, so immense that the intent of the forum member's actions becomes irrelevant. That said, GBS, when attempting to imitate FYAD, has been famously described as "like your grandfather speaking jive."
Most FYAD frequents hate GBS with a passion, because in addition to being one of the sort of communities that they love to mock, it sits, conveniently, one click above FYAD in the forums list. When someone is not funny enough for FYAD, or has betrayed FYAD sensibilities in some fashion, they will be told to "go back to GBS," or something along those lines. The distinction between GBS and FYAD posters is made particularly obvious by the "post count" system used in the forum. Whereas in all other forums, a post would add to your post count, in FYAD, one post is detracted from your post count for every post made. In this way, FYAD posters are, first, able to tell which of the two main forums, GBS or FYAD, a given user visits, and second, are able to distinguish the intent of the poster, eg. parody or idiocy. Also, individual posters are easily distinguishable by their avatar, or in vBulletin terms, custom title.
The avatars of some particularly notable FYAD users become famous within the community through the copying of their style. FYAD regular Nefarious, known for his avatar featuring an animated skull wearing a tophat, and the words "I'm MAD about hats!" has been honored repeatedly through such plagiarism. Similar avatars include an animated Jesus character, and a Star Wars character who is "MAD about droids!" Even more famous, the avatar of the poster Vector, a relatively plain depiction of a cartoon face, has been morphed into various other faces for the use as the avatar of other posters, including clowns, ninjas, and monocle-wearing Victorian gentlemen. Though similar acts of honoring other posters in this fashion are not limited to FYAD, they occur particularly often in its often exclusive, back-patting atmosphere.
The webmaster, Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka, is a frequent of FYAD, in spite of the fact that he destroyed the forum early on and did not resurrect it until they attacked GBS with shock sites. He has stated that it is frequently funnier than GBS. Such sympathies have also been expressed by several of the other administrators.
FYAD, in its earliest inception, was meant to be a rule-free, no-holds-barred arena for brutal verbal slugfests and horrifying images. Goons such as 3MTA3 and Brock Landers exemplified the style of classic FYAD, with their creative streams of invective dominating the forum. In the beginning, you went to FYAD to tell people, "fuck you, and die," a construance of the phrase "fuck off and die." It developed into its current state in relatively recent times.
FYAD has disappeared at various times, and on others, has been given moderators, which has certainly subverted its original purpose. After a wave of goatse.cx postings in GBS, Lowtax created an "All about goatse.cx" which soon turned into FYAG, the "G" standing for goatse.cx.
Though moderation of FYAD would give the appearance of control, the moderator positions are, more often than not, appointed to FYAD members who wish to "invis," or essentially delete, the threads of posters, particularly ones who would ordinarily post in GBS, who are considered unfunny. In FYAD, such a moderator is usually called an IK, or "Idiot King," but several other names have been given to them as well, among them, Bat King, Boat King, and Laser King, which were mostly named eponymously for the first user to take the title. Idiot Kings have been chosen by a variety of ways in the past, notably, by forcing the present IK to choose the next in the line of IK's, although this lead to the creation of "dynasties" whereby one IK would pass the crown to another of his own accounts. New Idiot Kings are currently appointed by a game of chance, in which the winner is made king, and the loser is banned and has to pay $10 to re-register. A notable exception to the roughly one-week limitation on the reign of an IK is the user Moof, who has remained an IK for a period of several months. These people are intended to be representative of FYAD culture, and are made flagships of FYAD ideology through the IK appointing procedure.
In spite of the general lack of control over FYAD, Lowtax prohibits the posting of any illegal or pseudo-legal image content in FYAD, even if it's considered a particularly funny image. In such a case, a person posting an image featuring a man forcing his penis into a raccoon's mouth was banned, in spite of the general regard for the image as being very humorous. In an exception to this rule, a regular (unusually) of both FYAD and GBS, Albrot, reenacted with real pictures of himself a famous animation in which a (drawn) nude boy with bunny ears and a small heart plastered across his anus dances seductively.
The more "official" explanation of FYAD, a joke in and of itself, is as follows:
It has been noted that an overly wordy description of FYAD is antithetical to the meaning and purpose of FYAD in and of itself. Therefore, an alternative means of understanding FYAD, in abbreviated fashion, has been provided below. It comes in the form of the "FYAD flag," a collection of rotating images that aptly illustrates "FYAD humour" more eloquently, perhaps, than this summation. It is included in the "External Links" section.
A sub-forum of FYAD that lasted only a day, this is notable as this was the only listed forum to have HTML enabled (there have been unlisted, hidden forums with HTML enabled before). This led to many threads being filled with gigantic pictures and scrolling text. The forum was closed for good after someone managed to steal 200 passwords using Javascript.
A short-lived forum (5th - 10th May 2004), it was invented by the relatively unknown moderators, Crème Lift and Brej, to be the antidote to the supposedly suffering levels of comedy in GBS and FYAD, and to mock all the negative tendencies of the other forums. Some users in The Situation set their signatures to different black-and-white pictures which didn't relate to anything, but were usually interesting. Many of the pictures had words in them, saying such profound things as 'this is situation', and 'the situation is'. This trend caught on quickly. Not surprisingly, FYAD labelled it a 'poor man's FYAD', and the regular posters of GBS continued posting threads regarding various inanities.
Often abbreviated to SH/SC, this forum is for the technical types. Many of the less technically inclined posters come here for computer advice, both for purchases and troubleshooting. Programming issues are also discussed here.
Trolling in this forum is more frequent than in most of the forums, particularly relative to the much more active GBS forum. This is most likely due to the rhetorical division between hardware and software-competent and incompetent computer users, across which there is a great deal of derision.
Most of the permabanned users from this forum now reside in #buttes on ZiRC, described in the IRC section below.
Strangely for a hardware forum, SH/SC has its own brand of comedy based around computing and though it is infrequent, SH/SC threads have been known to make it to the Comedy Goldmine.
Video games are represented here. Tips, requests, spoilers, and positive/negative reviews are rife. There are subforums devoted to traditional pen-and-paper and board games as well as private game servers.
Created by Lowtax in the fall of 2003 after a torrent of sports related threads in GBS, SAS is a place where goons can discuss sports issues without massive trolling from some GBS idiots.
Every sport from the big 4 (NBA, NHL, MLB, NFL) to Soccer (football) to WWE Wrestling is talked about.
SAS is the proud home of the legendary NFL gameday threads (a thread for each week of games leading up to the Super Bowl).
SAS also has two subforums, Fantasy Island, for discussion of Fantasy or Rotissere Sports and The Poker Paradise, created by admin OMGWTFBBQ after he tired of seeing poker threads clutter up the front page of SAS.
SAS is moderated by two dedicated moderators, Albrot and sba.
The bazaar of the Forums, where anybody may buy, sell, or trade anything so long as it is legal. Posters may also link to eBay auctions. Feedback about posters' experiences with a particular buyer or seller can be posted in a subforum of SA-Mart. However, the administrators and moderators disclaim any responsibility for actions between the buyer and seller. Nevertheless, defrauding a buyer is generally considered the worst thing a person can do on the forums (other than hacking the forums), and will almost always result in the user being banned permanently.
Often abbreviated to just the first word. This subforum of SA-Mart is the place to obtain exactly what's in the forum's title. The denizens of Coupons have been humorously derided as being cheapskates in the banner ads of the forums and in GBS.
This is the forum where discussion of politics and current events most often takes place. Debate and Discussion's roots lie in September 11th, when a new forum was created to accommodate all the discussion about the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and other U.S. targets. Originally titled Current Events, the name was eventually changed in a flurry of forums modification. A play on words of Dungeons & Dragons, also shortened to D&D. This forum's sometimes aggressive tendencies have meshed well with FYAD in the past, though the "cooperation" can be perceived as a long-standing in-joke. FYAD's image bar, prominently located at the top of every page of the subforum, has in rotation an image of an overweight man with a great deal of body hair; the overlayed text reads "[w]e got your back, D&D!"
Abbreviated often to TCC. A haven for users of recreational drugs, and discussion of them. No buying or selling of narcotics is allowed as that is illegal activity.
After noticing how numerous car threads were in GBS, the Something Awful forums moderators decided the topic deserved its own forum. The discussion forum "Automotive Insanity" was born. True to its name, "AI" is a paradise for vehicle enthusiasts.
A fairly new forum, dedicated to film reviews, and specifically not film discussion. Instead of the usual tags, all posts feature a 5-star rating system. The Film Dump is a marvelous way to get a certain perspective on films you don't usually find from conventional reviewers, and most reviews are followed by pages of debate.
One of the less frequented forums, Creative Convention is used by the more demiurgic members of the forums, or those who wish to enlist their talents. All manners of art, literature, photography, and even website design can be found within this forum.
Image manipulation by use of image editing programs such as Photoshop has spawned a wide following at Something Awful. This Creative Convention subforum is used to house entries to the weekly Photoshop contests, Photoshop Phriday and Goldmine Tuesday.
A much-maligned section of the SA forums, ADTRW is dedicated to the discussion of anime. Considered to harbor posters of a more intelligent caliber than most anime forums, ADTRW is nonetheless mocked regularly.
Some regulars in the ADTRW community run a site, , dedicated to fansubs of anime and manga.
The newest (as of 4/24/2004) discussion forum came to being at the whim of Lowtax. Citing that gun threads seemed out of place in GBS, he created a forum specifically for firearms. The creation was received well, and a dedicated moderator is already in place. TFR posters are encouraged to stay away from controversial topics as D&D was created specifically for debate.
Pet Cemetery (formerly Pet Island but renamed after a spate of pet deaths) is a former GBS subforum, but was recently upgraded to a full discussion forum complete with moderation. Created after GBS was under siege of post pics of your cat to cheer me up threads Lowtax created Pet Island. Pet Cemetery is by far the most benign forum seeing as most Something Awful goons find no reason to start fights when they have cute pictures of kittens to share. Pet Cemetery is a good resource for caretaking advice, pet selection tips, and humorous pet stories/pictures/movies.
Musician's Lounge is a haven for the amateur artists that inhabit the forums. The forum itself is similar in style to Creative Convention in terms of use and posting etiquette. Posters are advised to keep and open mind and respect others' tastes in music. The forum is used mostly for critiquing and general advice for aspiring musicans.
The absolute best of the best of the best threads. Threads that are voted up to the "Gold" rating may receive the blessing of being moved by a mod to the Comedy Goldmine archive where all users may see it. Currently the Goldmine goes back to October 2001; the archived Goldmine goes back to when the forums started using vBulletin.
Threads that have been deleted by the moderators are sent here and have been said to be "gassed". They have been judged not to be up to the standards of SA. Most of these threads are often silly things (i.e. troll postings, one-liners, gimmick posts, and the like).
This was formerly the forum that contained posts by administrators listing the users who had been banned, permabanned, or automatically banned by the forums software (this is an attempt at so-called forums Darwinism; instead of hiding users from administrator-only features, it bans them if they attempt it). The banning system has recently been upgraded and moved to a new page seperate from any of the forums, and this has now disappeared. Though this special page retains the same name, it is not a forum in the sense that it has threads and posts. Both the forum and the special page are interchangably referred to as The Leper's Colony or The Leper's Colon.
The Something Awful Forums community has many in-jokes, including:
The administrators of Something Awful view the forums as a center for comedy that needs to be constantly pruned. To prevent the degeneration of the forums, simple things that might be viewed as funny, such as quoting a post with only the word "what" in response, cause an immediate ban (suspension of one's account), and therefore the cost of $10 to re-register. This might seem harsh to an outside user, but as a technique to keep the forums clean it has apparently worked perfectly. It is also a technique that stops the excessive repeating of stale, overused catchphrases. Notable exceptions include several users, such as Esco mentioned above, who continued to pay $10 every time he was banned until he had donated over $150 to the forums, and then was permanently banned by Lowtax. All of Esco's payments were reversed through Paypal, claiming that he had "unauthorized access" to the account, so SA never received a dime from him.
The posting of CG or otherwise drawn pedophilic images, though technically legal as determined by the Supreme Court, is considered a bannable offense as well. Such images carry an association with Something Awful's anime forum, ADTRW, where the posting of such content was relatively frequent until an administrative decision was made to ban goons who did so. This was made on the basis of Lowtax's possible responsibility should he come under fire for, if not condoning, hosting pedophilic imagery, and also the general disdain for sexual deviance on such a level.
As well, there are certain extraneous rules that have gained fame within the community: the Toxx Clause, named after a user of the same name, dictates that any user who posts a thread where they promise to fulfill some obligation if their thread garners an adequate number of posts, will be banned if they do not follow through with their promise.
Permanent bans, usually referred to as permabans, are the permanent termination of a person's ability to hold an account on the forums. If a person is permanently banned, they are not allowed to register another account, even if they pay the registration fee, and if another account owned by that person is found, it will be banned on sight. Only the most grievous offenses incur permanent bans, such as posting of underaged pornography, scamming other users out of money or goods, attempting to hack the forums software, or being repeatedly banned and reregistering only to repeat past behavior. You can also recieve a permaban from "neither duck nor goosee" on the duck duck goose thread, but these are usually much more lax at getting a new account than previously mentioned offences.
ZIRC (irc.zirc.org ports 6660-6669 & 7000) is the network on which most SA related IRC channels can be found. The Something Awful Forums has had an often contentious relationship with its unofficial counterparts on IRC, and IRC was, for a while, regarded as a place of intrigue and plotting, at least until the majority of those involved in the ill-fated "IRC Illuminati" were banned from the forums. Regardless, many forums users continue to use IRC and several channels loosely correspond to specific SA forums.
In addition, The Alliance of Randomly Themed Servers (irc.pyoko.org port 6667) hosts #adtrw, which is for , and #raspberryheaven, which is where ADTRW discussion occurs.
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