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Something Awful Forums

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The Something Awful Forums (usually abbreviated as the SA Forums) is a set of limited-access highly-modified message boards system on the popular humor website Something Awful, with a large userbase (48,000). The forums are ranked (as of September 2004) by Big-Boards as the 7th most popular on the net, in spite of a registration fee being charged for access. [1]. It runs on a heavily modified version of VBulletin. People who frequent the Something Awful Forums call themselves "SA Goons," or simply "goons." The forums are strictly moderated. The community is international, but mostly comprised of American males in the teen to 20s age range.

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).

the something awful forums are for faggots eheh

LOL

Special-purpose forums

  • Comedy Goldmine - A repository of the very best threads. Currently the Goldmine goes back to October 2001; the archived Goldmine goes back to when the forums started using vBulletin.
  • Comedy Gas Chamber - 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.
  • The Leper's Colon(y) - 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 preventing users from seeing administrator-only features, they are kept visible and users' accounts are automatically banned if they attempt to use them). The banning system has recently been upgraded and moved to a new page separate 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 Colony or The Leper's Colon.
  • The Forum Archives - Threads which have remained dormant for a long time are moved to the Forum Archives, in which these threads are freely searchable. Accessing the Forum Archives requires the purchase of an Archive Account for $10.

Bannable offenses

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, or answering a computer question with any variant of "install linux, problem solved," would 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 well. A full list of bannable offenses are listed in the SA Forums rules, as well as descriptions of the kinds of punishment (like permanbans, hellbans, and probation).

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