Wikipediocracy

Looks like Encyclopedia Dramatica has lost their encyclopediadramatica.ch domain name. Guess who they are blaming for that?

From here:

Encyclopedia Dramatica, that bastardized version of Wikipedia, had a minor hiccup over the last 24 hours.

The controversial site used to be hosted on a server in Switzerland, but yesterday, according to associated Twitter and Facebook accounts, fell prey to a “DNS block.”

Update: In a Facebook comment, ED associates have denied Brandt had anything to do with their outage. Rather, it was due to their domain being frozen "because we didn't keep up our end of the nic.ch user agreement contract stating that we had to keep a mailing address and phone number in Switzerland," wrote an ED associate.

Hur hur. Idiots. I would believe that before any of this stuff about Brandt getting the DNS canceled.

EricBarbour wrote:

Update: In a Facebook comment, ED associates have denied Brandt had anything to do with their outage. Rather, it was due to their domain being frozen "because we didn't keep up our end of the nic.ch user agreement contract stating that we had to keep a mailing address and phone number in Switzerland," wrote an ED associate.

Hur hur. Idiots. I would believe that before any of this stuff about Brandt getting the DNS canceled.

They've just changed it to a Swedish host. Change the .ch to .se. End of story.

Anybody know anything about libel law in Sweden?

http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Dramatica&diff=991300&oldid=978367

David Gerard appears to be interested in the move as well. He loves ED:

http://encyclopediadramatica.se/Talk:David_Gerard

Down again! Up an' down, up an' down, wheeee.

EricBarbour wrote:Down again! Up an' down, up an' down, wheeee.

Do you find it curious that you take as much interest/glee in grave-dancing over ED's connection woes as Wikipedians once did over the WR's connection woes?

No, it annoys me, because I'm still going thru (what is left of) ED's database.
They saved a number of little factoids that you can't find anywhere else online.

Besides, these "awesome hackers" can't seem to keep a miserable little website online, so what does that say about their "1337 skillz"?

g/w/index.php?title=Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Dramatica&diff=991300&oldid=978367]http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?tit ... &diff=9913 00&oldid=978367[/url]

David Gerard appears to be interested in the move as well. He loves ED:

[http://encyclopediadramatica.se/Talk:David_%20%20Gerard]http://encyclopediadramatica.se/Talk:David_Gerard[/url]

Hey, thanks for the unstoppable spam pop-ups. Nothing like a little malware to get my evening rolling...


RfB

Just checked again--still down---their new Swedish hosting seems to have failed them. Oopsiedaisy.

EricBarbour wrote:Just checked again--still down---their new Swedish hosting seems to have failed them. Oopsiedaisy.

A handy tool; http://downorisitjustme.com/res.php?url ... amatica.se

https://encyclopediadramatica.es/Girlvinyl/Emails

If anyone is researching or writing about how and why Encyclopedia Dramatica shut down and how and why Ohinternet came into being, I've publicly published the Emails regarding the January 23rd incident and its immediate aftermath (i.e. Sherrod's reaction and who was blamed and punished).

Michaeldsuarez wrote:...I've publicly published the Emails...

Hmm, there appears to be a technical problem with this link you've posted, in that getting it to work might require me to move my wrist and my index finger in a really, really stupid way.

I don't suppose you could give us a quick two-sentence synopsis?

Midsize Jake wrote:

Michaeldsuarez wrote:...I've publicly published the Emails...

Hmm, there appears to be a technical problem with this link you've posted, in that getting it to work might require me to move my wrist and my index finger in a really, really stupid way.

I don't suppose you could give us a quick two-sentence synopsis?

Sherrod the Creator of ED wrote:I have a grand plan to turn ED into a kinder, gentler place for peop... WHO THE FUCK IS POSTING THIS SHIT TO THE FUCKING PRESS!?! THIS IS A PRIVATE MAILING LIST! Whoever it is will SUFFFER!! I want User:X BANNED, that STUPID MOTHER@(*%$(@. I HATE HIM! I HATE HIM! I HATE HIM! Now the stupid motherfuckers are doing stupid things running all over the fucking Internet talking about my fucking happy grand plan! I HATE EVERYONE! I HATE ALL OF YOU! I can't take this SHIT! I want out! This SHIT is FUCKING OVER! GET IT?!?! OVER!

That's more than two sentences, but I'm using a Poetic License (as opposed to a Creative Commons License). If you replace "ED" with "Wikipedia," I predict Jimbo Wales will say the same thing when he flames out and leaves Wikipedia to rot without him.

Michaeldsuarez wrote:If anyone is researching or writing about how and why Encyclopedia Dramatica ...

Yaaawwn.

Midsize Jake wrote:Hmm, there appears to be a technical problem with this link you've posted, in that getting it to work might require me to move my wrist and my index finger in a really, really stupid way.

Quite. My curiosity got the better of me and I typed that link into an iPhone (no way am I letting that site touch my computer browser) and it still spawned popups and showed me closeups of graphic anal sex. Classy!

Michaeldsaurez, even though everyone should know by now that visiting The New ED is about as safe as having a two minute bareback romance with a chap you met next to the McDonalds dumpster downtown, would it kill you to tack on "NSFW" as a reminder?

Midsize Jake wrote:I don't suppose you could give us a quick two-sentence synopsis?

1. Apparently someone named thayo leaked super secret unspecified things from a mailing list and made the ED owner sad.
2. Semantic Mediawiki is the next big thing! A real paradigm shifter!

Midsize Jake wrote:I don't suppose you could give us a quick two-sentence synopsis?

By January 23, 2011, Encyclopedia Dramatica becomes too much for Sherrod to handle, so she shuts it down suddenly and leaves a brief message for the sysops. One of the persons responsible for ED's social media stuff Thayo posts "RIP" on Twitter and stirs up commotion and attention, and Sherrod didn't want either of them. Adrian Chen then publishes an article on Gawker. Chen contacts Sherrod, and Sherrod makes up a story and brings ED back up, which results in Chen rewriting the Gawker article. Sherrod then has Thayo banned from ED and its media pages. If it weren't for Thayo and Chen, the original ED would've probably had ceased to exist on January 23, 2011, instead of April 10 / 11, 2011.

On the next day (January 24th), Sherrod unveils her plans for OhInternet privately to the sysops.She might've had the OhInternet idea in her head for a little while earlier, since she asked about Semantic MediaWiki on January 18th.

Michaeldsuarez wrote:

Midsize Jake wrote:I don't suppose you could give us a quick two-sentence synopsis?

By January 23, 2011, Encyclopedia Dramatica becomes too much for Sherrod to handle, so she shuts it down suddenly and leaves a brief message for the sysops. One of the persons responsible for ED's social media stuff Thayo posts "RIP" on Twitter and stirs up commotion and attention, and Sherrod didn't want either of them. Adrian Chen then publishes an article on Gawker. Chen contacts Sherrod, and Sherrod makes up a story and brings ED back up, which results in Chen rewriting the Gawker article. Sherrod then has Thayo banned from ED and its media pages. If it weren't for Thayo and Chen, the original ED would've probably had ceased to exist on January 23, 2011, instead of April 10 / 11, 2011.

On the next day (January 24th), Sherrod unveils her plans for OhInternet privately to the sysops.She might've had the OhInternet idea in her head for a little while earlier, since she asked about Semantic MediaWiki on January 18th.

I'm going to regret asking this, but why didn't she retire, start her new project elsewhere, and distance herself from ED? She could have been like Larry Sanger and gone on to greater things.

Michaeldsuarez wrote:

Midsize Jake wrote:I don't suppose you could give us a quick two-sentence synopsis?

By January 23, 2011, Encyclopedia Dramatica becomes too much for Sherrod to handle, so she shuts it down suddenly and leaves a brief message for the sysops. One of the persons responsible for ED's social media stuff Thayo posts "RIP" on Twitter and stirs up commotion and attention, and Sherrod didn't want either of them. Adrian Chen then publishes an article on Gawker. Chen contacts Sherrod, and Sherrod makes up a story and brings ED back up, which results in Chen rewriting the Gawker article. Sherrod then has Thayo banned from ED and its media pages. If it weren't for Thayo and Chen, the original ED would've probably had ceased to exist on January 23, 2011, instead of April 10 / 11, 2011.

On the next day (January 24th), Sherrod unveils her plans for OhInternet privately to the sysops.She might've had the OhInternet idea in her head for a little while earlier, since she asked about Semantic MediaWiki on January 18th.

That was longer than two sentences.

Not that it matters, I was bored well before getting to the end of the first sentence.

SB_Johnny wrote:Not that it matters, I was bored well before getting to the end of the first sentence.

Admittedly, it was a pretty hard slog, but these are things we have to endure on the off chance that interesting facts might emerge. However, in this case we still don't really know (or do we?) what stress factors had been imposed on Sherrod DiGrippo that caused her to decide ED was no longer worth operating, at least not in its then-current form - other than the simple fact that her identity (and, as I recall, physical location) was becoming more and more well-known to her victims. Even if that hadn't already led to lawsuits and other threats, she might have grown increasingly paranoid over time, if only because of her knowing that she was no longer as anonymous as she probably wanted to be.

If I had to guess, I'd say someone probably threatened her. With what I don't know, but it's not like running the site was making her wealthy or popular anyway. It would have been an easy decision, even for someone with strong antisocial tendencies.

Midsize Jake wrote:

SB_Johnny wrote:Not that it matters, I was bored well before getting to the end of the first sentence.

Admittedly, it was a pretty hard slog, but these are things we have to endure on the off chance that interesting facts might emerge. However, in this case we still don't really know (or do we?) what stress factors had been imposed on Sherrod DiGrippo that caused her to decide ED was no longer worth operating, at least not in its then-current form - other than the simple fact that her identity (and, as I recall, physical location) was becoming more and more well-known to her victims. Even if that hadn't already led to lawsuits and other threats, she might have grown increasingly paranoid over time, if only because of her knowing that she was no longer as anonymous as she probably wanted to be.

If I had to guess, I'd say someone probably threatened her. With what I don't know, but it's not like running the site was making her wealthy or popular anyway. It would have been an easy decision, even for someone with strong antisocial tendencies.

That would be a good guess.

Also, consider several events that took place in the last half of 2010: 1) the start of the "josephevers.blogspot.com" blog, 2) the Operation Payback article attracting FBI attention to the site, 3) the suicide of OldDirtyBtard (one of the sysops), 4) and the indictment of Weev, another sysop.

The Joy wrote: I'm going to regret asking this, but why didn't she retire, start her new project elsewhere, and distance herself from ED? She could have been like Larry Sanger and gone on to greater things.

Her attempts to distance herself from the site (Joseph Evers, for instance) failed. She claimed she lived in fear because of ED, so it might have been an "I've had enough of this shit" moment.

I do not know why OhInternet was closed, but the rumors range from "OhI was unsuccessful", to "Encyclopediadramatica.com might return". Your guess is as good as mine.
[edited]

Sherrod wrote:personal attack articles, tons of blatant and stupid racism, random played out 2007 style junk

Interesting to see that this was recognized right at the top level of ED management.

mac wrote: I do not know why OhInternet was closed, but the rumors range from "OhI was unsuccessful", to "Encyclopediadramatica.com might return". Your guess is as good as mine.

Because the competition was Know Your Meme, who pwned them?

Hex wrote:

Sherrod wrote:personal attack articles, tons of blatant and stupid racism, random played out 2007 style junk

Interesting to see that this was recognized right at the top level of ED management.

Oh yeah. Don't let anyone assume Sherrod and Andy didn't know exactly what was going on.

Best part: they were both Department of Defense employees at the time.....ooh, conspiracies!

Hex wrote:

Sherrod wrote:personal attack articles, tons of blatant and stupid racism, random played out 2007 style junk

Interesting to see that this was recognized right at the top level of ED management.

mac wrote: I do not know why OhInternet was closed, but the rumors range from "OhI was unsuccessful", to "Encyclopediadramatica.com might return". Your guess is as good as mine.

Because the competition was Know Your Meme, who pwned them?

Touche.

What's ED?

enwikibadscience wrote:What's ED?

Encyclopedia Dramatica.

enwikibadscience wrote:What's ED?

A wretched hive of scum and villainy.

The Joy wrote:

enwikibadscience wrote:What's ED?

A wretched hive of scum and villainy.

So a nickname for en.Wikipedia?

enwikibadscience wrote:

The Joy wrote:

enwikibadscience wrote:What's ED?

A wretched hive of scum and villainy.

So a nickname for en.Wikipedia?

ED is dedicated to documenting "Internet drama" and engages in extreme scatological and hyperbolic "humor" (pictures of murdered people, lynchings, antisemitism, etc.). It started as a group on LiveJournal and was banned for harassment and general despicable behavior. This group created the original ED, which was later turned into a less-controversial website ("Oh! Internet") by ED's sole founder after she had a crisis of conscience (and due to continued harassment against her for hosting the darn thing). The current incarnation ED was formed by those against the sole founder's decision to change the site. It's a sewer just like the original and one of it's co-founders was arrested for illegal hacking. The current ED (like its predecessor) have troubles with malware, so don't go there without maximum anti-virus protection. That's the very short version off the top of my head.

Michael and others could give you more details, if you desire. It may be best to do that via PM. We try not to intentionally harangue people known to hack websites.

The Joy wrote:

enwikibadscience wrote:

The Joy wrote:

enwikibadscience wrote:What's ED?

A wretched hive of scum and villainy.

So a nickname for en.Wikipedia?

ED is dedicated to documenting "Internet drama" and engages in extreme scatological and hyperbolic "humor" (pictures of murdered people, lynchings, antisemitism, etc.). It started as a group on LiveJournal and was banned for harassment and general despicable behavior. This group created the original ED, which was later turned into a less-controversial website ("Oh! Internet") by ED's sole founder after she had a crisis of conscience (and due to continued harassment against her for hosting the darn thing). The current incarnation ED was formed by those against the sole founder's decision to change the site. It's a sewer just like the original and one of it's co-founders was arrested for illegal hacking. The current ED (like its predecessor) have troubles with malware, so don't go there without maximum anti-virus protection. That's the very short version off the top of my head.

Michael and others could give you more details, if you desire. It may be best to do that via PM. We try not to intentionally harangue people known to hack websites.

Not much more curiosity about it, just did not know what you were talking about.

The Joy wrote:

enwikibadscience wrote:

The Joy wrote:

enwikibadscience wrote:What's ED?

A wretched hive of scum and villainy.

So a nickname for en.Wikipedia?

ED is dedicated to documenting "Internet drama" and engages in extreme scatological and hyperbolic "humor" (pictures of murdered people, lynchings, antisemitism, etc.). It started as a group on LiveJournal and was banned for harassment and general despicable behavior. This group created the original ED, which was later turned into a less-controversial website ("Oh! Internet") by ED's sole founder after she had a crisis of conscience (and due to continued harassment against her for hosting the darn thing). The current incarnation ED was formed by those against the sole founder's decision to change the site. It's a sewer just like the original and one of it's co-founders was arrested for illegal hacking. The current ED (like its predecessor) have troubles with malware, so don't go there without maximum anti-virus protection. That's the very short version off the top of my head.

Michael and others could give you more details, if you desire. It may be best to do that via PM. We try not to intentionally harangue people known to hack websites.

There are over 9,000 reasons not to read ED...

The Joy wrote:ED is dedicated to documenting "Internet drama" and engages in extreme scatological and hyperbolic "humor" (pictures of murdered people, lynchings, antisemitism, etc.).

Better known as schadenfreude.

The Joy wrote:It started as a group on LiveJournal and was banned for harassment and general despicable behavior.

LJDrama.

The Joy wrote:This group created the original ED, which was later turned into a less-controversial website ("Oh! Internet") by ED's sole founder after she had a crisis of conscience (and due to continued harassment against her for hosting the darn thing).

Sherrod DeGrippo, specifically. Brandt was the ultimate malefactor with regard to getting ed.com shut down, in what could quite generously be described as a Pyrrhic victory.

The Joy wrote:The current incarnation ED was formed by those against the sole founder's decision to change the site.

No, Anonymous did the lion's share of restoration. Even the most inept are entitled to a victory here and there.

The Joy wrote:It's a sewer just like the original and one of it's co-founders was arrested for illegal hacking.

Honorable men may differ. Ryan's arrest for DDOSing was the beginning of the end for Anonymous' involvement, after which ED was returned to veteran editors loyal to the cause.

The Joy wrote:The current ED (like its predecessor) have troubles with malware, so don't go there without maximum anti-virus protection.

No? Even without SELinux or NoScript, my Windows box has never been compromised. I suppose there is some small measure of truth to it, however, as a handful of such claims have been made.

Herbert West wrote:

The Joy wrote:It started as a group on LiveJournal and was banned for harassment and general despicable behavior.

LJDrama.

I had an LJ account way, way back in the mists of time. Occasionally I'd take a look at LJDrama and think "Jesus Christ, these people need to go outside."

EricBarbour wrote: For its first few years ED was part and parcel of the Wikipedia "community", whether they admit it or not.

Yes. All the worst players of the bad old years appeared on it. Whether it was them writing about each other, or just a few people writing about them from the sidelines, I could never tell. But looking at those pages today provides an invaluable insight about the poisonous atmosphere of that era.

ED would be a lot funnier without the obvious look how offensive we are to everyone racism/homophobia/antisemitism/etc., IMHO. I can see why Sherrod had second thoughts.

Herbert West wrote:

The Joy wrote:The current ED (like its predecessor) have troubles with malware, so don't go there without maximum anti-virus protection.

No? Even without SELinux or NoScript, my Windows box has never been compromised. I suppose there is some small measure of truth to it, however, as a handful of such claims have been made.

I've never had a shred of trouble with it. I have Adblock installed (likewise, on Windows), so this makes me think that whatever these problems are, they're being served from ads. The actual site's content? Seems fine.

The Joy wrote:Getting away from lest Michael go .

The scariest userpages to me are those that basically scream "I am a young child on Wikipedia with no understanding whatsoever on Internet safety." Even scarier is not knowing if those pages really belong to actual children or pedophiles posing as children to lure other children. I wouldn't necessarily ban my child from ever editing Wikipedia, but I would set clear rules and make sure I could monitor his/her interactions. Unfortunately, not many children on the Web today understand the danger of the Pedobear (T-H-L) and have parents/guardians watching them.

I had to get one of those oversighted, and the original request was denied, so I had to appeal to a second brain-dead-basement-dwelling-12-year-old and got an adult the second time, by accident, and he was so shocked at the initial failure that he could not sycophant in the cc'ed reply.

Other editors and admins were lamely interacting with this child. Scream!

Zoloft wrote:

enwikibadscience wrote:What's ED?

Encyclopedia Dramatica.

See also...

Hersch wrote:

Zoloft wrote:

enwikibadscience wrote:What's ED?

Encyclopedia Dramatica.

See also...

I now know what ED is. I had looked at it years ago. It is irrelevant to me. Thanks for all the answers.

See also:
* https://encyclopediadramatica.es/Fae
* https://encyclopediadramatica.es/Ironholds

Still useful, IMO.

enwikibadscience wrote:It is irrelevant to me.

Not to me. A surprising amount of Wikipedia's internal history was preserved on ED. Most of the hard information was lost when Sherrod dumped it and Ryan Cleary and his little lost boys took it over in 2010.

Hex wrote:All the worst players of the bad old years appeared on it. Whether it was them writing about each other, or just a few people writing about them from the sidelines, I could never tell. But looking at those pages today provides an invaluable insight about the poisonous atmosphere of that era.

Do you think it's better or worse now? At least the trains ran on time when the cabals were around... now the trains either never come at all or seem to have nothing between the locomotive and the caboose when they arrive a year late and a ria stone short..

SB_Johnny wrote:Do you think it's better or worse now? At least the trains ran on time when the cabals were around... now the trains either never come at all or seem to have nothing between the locomotive and the caboose when they arrive a year late and a stone short..

And the trains were Jewish, pro-Israel, aggressively LGBT friendly, hostile to Scientology/TM/whatever, favorable to Prem Rawat, raving about NLP, favorable to bestiality, hated global-warming critics, hated 9/11 and other conspiracy theories (covered a lot of forgotten ground there), etc. etc.

And had big signs on the side reading "JIMBO WAS THE SOLE FOUNDER" and "LARRY SANGER DOES NOT EXIST".
Pretty funny trains.

EricBarbour wrote:

SB_Johnny wrote:Do you think it's better or worse now? At least the trains ran on time when the cabals were around... now the trains either never come at all or seem to have nothing between the locomotive and the caboose when they arrive a year late and a stone short..

And the trains were Jewish, pro-Israel, aggressively LGBT friendly, hostile to Scientology/TM/whatever, favorable to Prem Rawat, raving about NLP, favorable to bestiality, hated global-warming critics, hated 9/11 and other conspiracy theories (covered a lot of forgotten ground there), etc. etc.

And had big signs on the side reading "JIMBO WAS THE SOLE FOUNDER" and "LARRY SANGER DOES NOT EXIST".
Pretty funny trains.

"And the trains were Jewish..."

Huh?

charliemouse wrote:"And the trains were Jewish..."

Huh?

He means that one of the more significant "cabals" during the 2004-2008 period (and arguably, to this day) existed to promote the interests of Israel, Judaism, and the Jewish diaspora in general, for better or worse. Mr. Barbour isn't anti-semitic, and he isn't saying they were bad people, though they have engaged in some very shady tactics on Wikipedia over the years.

The "cabal=train" analogy is probably inappropriate to begin with, but I can see why some would object to it for, shall we say, other reasons.

I have no recollection of why I thought this topic was a good idea, or even an idea... or even...

*locks topic*

Before everyone thinks I'm or , my point in bringing the subject back is that there were attempts to make a Dramatica for whole family. There was "WhatPort80", which appeared near the end of the original ED, and then there was the longer-lived "Oh, Internet", which winked out of existence last year. Both tried to do Encyclopaedia Dramatica without the barf-inducing images and all the Jew jokes, and they failed because the sort of people who waste time on ED love the gross-out elements and the racism. Following the lead of her two failed wanna-EDs, Sherrod DeGrippo's blog (http://www.sherrod.im/) is extremely dull.

http://www.whatport80.com (Don't know where that goes.)
http://www.ohinternet.com (Might shout "satan IS LORD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" over and over.)

Tsk, Sherrod finally got tired of the old "satire" bit. Whether she likes it or not, I suspect that ED, her "greatest creation", will likely outlive her. The Net evidently cannot exist without a dungeon for its premier assholes.

EricBarbour wrote:Tsk, Sherrod finally got tired of the old "satire" bit. Whether she likes it or not, I suspect that ED, her "greatest creation", will likely outlive her. The Net evidently cannot exist without a dungeon for its premier assholes.

And Reddit isn't a big enough asshole loser dungeon for the web? I always thought it was so nice to have so many occupied with each other.

EricBarbour wrote:Tsk, Sherrod finally got tired of the old "satire" bit. Whether she likes it or not, I suspect that ED, her "greatest creation", will likely outlive her. The Net evidently cannot exist without a dungeon for its premier assholes.

Are you talking about the writers or the subject matter? ED expanded beyond the "camwhore dramah queens" of LiveJournal; they now hit "Internet celebrities" (video reviewers like James "The Angry Videogame Nerd" Rolfe or Noah "Spoony" Antwiler), countries (every entry sounds like a drunk P.J. O'Rourke), and all the other "encyclopedic" subject matter of Wikipedia. That's what DiGrippo hated, that the project was expanding beyond mocking people like Boxxy, and that's why she tried to scale it back with "WP80" and "Oh, Internet."

enwikibadscience wrote:And Reddit isn't a big enough asshole loser dungeon for the web? I always thought it was so nice to have so many occupied with each other.

First rule of Fight Club: do not talk about Fight Club. Second rule of Fight Club: do not talk about Fight Club.
Third rule of Fight Club: start more Fight Clubs.

The first I knew of Encyclopedia Dramatica was when it copied over the content my Arbcom Accountability Project to its Arbcom article. That was pretty cool. But then I noticed some seamier stuff over there. I recall gore and heavy vulgarity and bad treatment particularly of Gorillawarfare (then-administrator now-arbitrator Molly White), however I do not see the Gorilla material there now.

Anyhow, I now noticed that it's begun articles on Yank Barry and Americandad86. If Yank is somehow reading this, I'd say don't go and get irked about your article there, Yank. Those are guys you'll probably never be able to sue and they can always argue "obvious parody." Dramatica articles do not appear high up in search engine results, so unlike your Wikipedia article, you're better off pretending it doesn't exist.

The Americandad86 article is a mystery to me. I'm familiar with him, having commented extensively in the forums on his case as a typical example of the hella abusive handling of content editors by Wikipedia's ruling class of congenitally cyberbully administrators. But he's still pretty obscure. Why would someone write an article on him? Anyhow, he's taking it in stride *like* *a* *boss* at his Wikipedia talkpage, in part, "Please help promote the website everyone. At best, it's probably only getting 100 views a day. It's the laughingstock of Urban Dictionary and the more popular websites across the Internet. But c'mon! These people at Dramatica like Krackerack are working hard to be funny so let's give him a few views, huh?! Help the kid out all. Cheers! AmericanDad86 (talk) 21:03, 29 June 2014 (UTC)." LOL! Way to go, Americandad86!

In closing I'll note that sometimes Encyclopedia Dramatica seems to me to go offline for long stretches. Is it a fly-by-the-seat-of-its-pants operation, where some dudes maintain the database on their personal hard-drives, getting bounced from one ISP to the next, and looking to get it back up? If anyone can enlighten me on this interesting website and its history and all of these curiosities I've raised, I'd be grateful to hear back.

Encyclopedia Dramatica was created possibly near the end of year 2004 as a wiki/container for material related to discussions hosted on Livejournal, and in particular, discussions which contained generous amounts of trolling, flaming, and baiting. Not only discussions but people and other tangentially related things as well.

After a year or so, the site started documenting stories and happenings created on a whole set of sites othen than LJ, such as IRC chat rooms, 4chan, and Wikipedia. Given the strong anti-social streak of the users who were creating content, the site started hosting progressively more and more defaming material with direct and malicious attacks towards certain internet users who saw their personal information being posted on the site. The moderation was doing little to contain the phenomenon because it was essentially the very fuel needed for a big fire.

Wikipedia and Wikipedians started being more present on the site after year 2006, which is in line with the peak of users at Wikipedia corresponding to year 2007-2008.

Jump to year 2010 and the owners of ED had to quit the site due to repeated problems with the law.

After that, the site never really regained its popularity, possibly because now people tend to be more careful about what they do online, or what they do online is trivial and boring, or more people stopped caring about insults made against them.

Either that, or Reddit has arisen as King of the Hill of Defamation and Insults.

You see, it's just the same thing repeated over and over, packs of white hooded guys hanging others to the highest branch on a tree! I guess Girlvinyl gave too much rope to her masked e-friends, so those who were persecuted decided to gather together and get back at them, first getting them hooded guys, then got some rope, and then gave Sherrod and her closest friends a really long neck. Figuratively speaking

What questions do you still have after reading Encyclopedia Dramatica (T-H-L) and all of the reliable sources linked from there?