Kuro5hin
From Encyclopedia Dramatica
Kuro5hin (K5) (pronounced kuro-FIVE-hin) is a "gated dysfunctional community" [1] for people far removed from the real world and who tend to wallow in their own shit inside the "diary ghetto."[2] Unlike its rivals Slashdot and Metafilter, K5 is far more vindictive, petty, and mean. The site was shat out into the internet in 1999 by Rusty Foster, and many say he will rot in hell for it.
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[edit] Overview
Kuro5hin users typically live on the fringe of society. Most are minimally employed, usually in a computer-related field like programming or network administration, and adhere to political ideologies no one else cares about. Their lives are empty except for the internet, where they read each other's uninformed commentary and engage in endlessly circle-jerking each other off. Most users try to rationalize their social and mental deficiencies by believing themselves to be extremely clever internet trolls, however it is very easy to enrage them by attacking their beliefs or breaking the unwritten rules of their precious community.citation needed
K5 users are referred to variously as kurons, kuroshits, and ghey-5ers.
Rusty Foster has long since given up on the site and views it as a cash cow that should be milked for the ad revenue while it lasts and charges $5 for activating new accounts to post diaries, comments, and stories. Rusty claims he started Kuro5hin for the LULZ, much like Encyclopedia Dramatica was formed. Moderators and Admins are absentee landlords on K5, and after $5 was charged for new accounts, it is rare to see an anonymization of a member account for abuse anymore.
Most of the members there have left, for better places on teh Internets, leaving only retarded trolls, anarchists, insane people, people on disability or welfare, Ron Paul supporters, Homosexuals who have cybersex on IRC via Slashnet's #Kuro5hin channel, Neocons like LILDebbie, and people more left-wing that Stalin ever was. Anyone with half-a-brain has already left Kuro5hin and moved on with their lives, the rest just refuse to learn their lessons.
K5 is powered by Scoop, which has so many exploits and security holes and bugs, it makes Microsoft Windows look like Linux by comparison. As a result a lot of old accounts got hacked and taken over by trolls and every day there is at least 6 members that gain administrative access via exploit.
[edit] Features
Foster had decided in a fit of extraordinary idiocy that all content should be generated and selected by the users themselves. Registered users can submit stories to the submissions queue. In the queue, users vote +1 FP (front page), +1, 0, or -1. If the story reaches a predetermined threshold score (originally at +95 and lowered to +40 in December 2006 due to the site's waning popularity), it is posted to the front page or to the relevant section depending on the proportion of FP votes. If it fails to make the threshold, other factors (such as number of comments and their ratings) can still cause the story to be posted to section. Otherwise, it is dropped.
Authors can enable edit mode which means that a story is protected from voting for a period of time during which the author can make changes. Comments can be made on the story during this time to insult the author and rehash ancient internet memes.
Another feature are the diaries that allow unmoderated posting by any user. They are essentially weblogs and the source of the majority of Kuro5hin's content.
[edit] History
In June 2002 Foster suggested that he might be forced to sell or shut down Kuro5hin due to lack of funds. Basement-dwelling idiots began breaking their piggy banks and gave more than $37,000 in donations and other support. Shortly thereafter Foster announced plans to create a non-profit organization known as the Collaborative Media Foundation to manage K5. The CMF never materialized, and users have been critical of a lack of site development and functional improvements, suspecting that Foster had simply embezzled the donated funds for personal use. Today the site runs on bandwidth provided by sponsor voxel dot net, with ad revenues going directly into Foster's pocket.
In early 2003 a fiction section was added in order to allow hack writers like localroger to promote themselves and drive traffic to the site.
On March 25, 2004, a user posted an image[3] showing Rusty Foster's wife having sex with a black man. Foster threw a tantrum and shut down new user registrations, followed by an announcement that he was going to implement a user sponsorship system. Nothing ever came of this, and eventually falling ad revenue forced Foster to reopen account creation on July 13.
On July 04, 2005, Kuro5hin published a front page article titled "Fuck Natalee Holloway".[4] Almost instantly new users began signing up to denounce the author and Kuro5hin administrators, in the process lining Foster's pockets with more money from ad impressions.
On June 14, 2006, a cross-site scripting vulnerability was used to compromise cookies belonging to administrators, allowing the attacker(s) to embed a redirect to Last Measure into every page on the site. Kuro5hin existed in this state for about fifteen minutes before being taken down entirely. After approximately two hours of downtime the site was restored to its normal state.
On January 15, 2007, user MichaelCrawford was banned for writing a humorous article about site administrator Peter Whysall (pwhysall) that offered to buy him a ticket to The Netherlands so he could get rid of his pent up sexual tension and get laid by hookers.[5] Users successfully demanded that Crawford be given his account back, and pwhysall hasn't been heard of since. Pwhysall is also an administrator at the IWETHEY forums [6] and is an editor at Kuro5hin.
On September 08, 2007, Rusty decides to make Kuro5hin a paid site. [7] New user registrations now have to be activated by paying $5, in hopes to cut down on the trolls and dupes that frequent the Scoop site. On September 10th, 2007 Rusty claims Kuro5hin is a gated dysfunctional community [8] and says that old accounts not banned will be grandfathered in with benefits like spell check and hotlists, without having to pay the $5 to activate them. Critics have claimed that Rusty had copied the ponzi-scheme for this new business plan for Kuro5hin.
On September 12, 2007, Troll Hard aka Orion Blastar finally gets a story published to the front page [9] on Kuro5hin proving that Rusty's new policy acts like the Patriot Act and cracks down on dupe accounts. Orion Blastar has a history of having dupe hordes vote down his stories and zero rate his comments since 2002. Finally the people behind the dupes have to pay $5 to create a new dupe account and couldn't pay for enough counts to rig the voting to vote down one of Orion Blastar's latest stories. On September 16th, one user, Tex Bigballs posting with a new account as his old one got anonymized for zero bombing Orion Blastar's comments, compares Rusty Foster to George W. Bush, and is upset that Orion Blastar got a story on BitTorrent published. [10]
On November 5, 2007, trhurler, one of the first and most active K5 users ever, died.[11] However, this had nothing at all to do with Orion Blastar.
[edit] How to get Banned on Kuro5hin
Rusty and other admins ban users and they call it anonymizing. When a user account is anonymized they can still log on, but have no user rights to post comments, diaries, stories, or rate comments, or anything else a normal use can do. Sometimes accounts get rights taking away like comment rating rights which prevent the user from rating comments and seeing hidden comments.
Crapflooding is one way to get banned and it is very popular by the trolls. It is like spamming, but instead diaries and comments are posted which contain "crap" values like ASCII art of Goatse (since Kuro5hin does not allow images in messages, crapflooders stick to ASCII art) or a Kitten, page widening diaries that widen the page beyond 80 columns using HTML tricks, the same diary and phrases over and over again, using key words that are very long and consist mostly of random numbers in the diaries, posting links to Rustina, Goatse, Tubgirl, 4Chan pictures and claiming that the link does something else, etc. Some Crapflooders use a lot of dupe accounts and a web robot script to post the diaries for them from anonymous proxy servers from each different web robot so it is harder for admins to ban them. One crapflooder was a spell check bot and found errors in each post even if they were spelled correct, and it used dupe accounts to avoid being banned as well.
Zero bombing, if a comment can be hidden there is a rating of 0 to 3, and people are supposed to give a 0 rating to a comment that has crapflooding in it to help hide it. An abuse of the zero rating is called zero bombing, when people who hate another user use it to try and hide all of their comments and thus censor them. 0 stands for hide, 1 stands for discourage, 2 stands for neutral, and 3 stands for encourage. There is a review hidden comments link for normal and above users who can rate comments with 3's until they are no longer hidden. Entire dupe hordes can hide comments of selected users on a shit list that they share on IRC and use IRC to recruit more people in their zero bombing campaigns. Originally Rusty didn't care about it, until Rusty and some other admins got hit, and then they crack down on zero bombing only if it gets out of hand. Web robots can be used to use dupe accounts to target a UID and zero rate all of their comments.
Annoying the admins, this rule is an unwritten rule but Rusty and the admins go by it. If a member annoys the admins enough, they will ban the account. For example in November 2004, Orion Blastar was being targeted by dupe accounts doing the "kill yourself with a shotgun" troll and zero bombing his comments. So Orion used a dupe account he had called Norjak to announce that Orion Blastar had committed suicide. [12] It annoyed the admins, and Pwhysall called Norjak/Orion on it because he saw them post from the same IP address. Though there was no rule at the time that users couldn't have more than one account and no rule against doing an Alt.Suicide.Holiday in a diary and doing a Cyberdeath instead of a real Suicide, Orion Blastar and the Norjak account got banned, despite the Orion Blastar account not being in on the fake suicide troll. Orion claims he suffers from schizoaffective disorder and had been going through a lot of stress in his life, and too many people told him to go kill himself, so he took it figuratively instead of literally, and wrote fiction with a new name claiming to have died to satisfy the people telling him to kill himself. This is not original and a user named Signal 11 had done the same troll a few years earlier, as do people on the Alt.Suicide.Holiday newsgroup do it every day. Anyway later in September 11, 2007 one of the admins let the rest of Kuro5hin in on the unwritten rule. [13]
[edit] K5 is dying
Since ca. Oct. 2005, K5 has been either dying or not. A common trend in K5 diaries is to announce that K5 is dying and that Rusty Foster's experiment had failed. Many K5 members post diaries with proof of K5 dying or failures, but this Internet MEME has continued on for years and years. However, this prophecy is nearing completion.
[edit] Notable Users
- Rusty Foster (rusty), Kuro5hin's founder
- Andy Zebrowitz (kitten), Kuro5hin's village idiot
- Roger Williams (localroger), unpublished writer of science fiction stories featuring incestuous pedophilia
- Michael Crawford (MichaelCrawford), unemployed computer programmer suffering from schizoaffective disorder
- David Teeuwen (Egil Skallagrimson (banned)), William S. Burroughs fanboi and member of United Christers of Canada
- Josh Knarr (GhostOfTiber), neo-Nazi
- Scott Lockwood (Vladinator, smothie, smoothie, ghostofsmoothie (banned)), self-proclaimed businessman and martial artist
- Orion Blastar (Troll Hard) real name Glenn Beck, Programmer/Analyst and story contributor who got tired of being trolled, his stories voted down, and being zero rated by dupes, created many alter egos such as Troll Hard, Norjak, Orion Blastar and started to troll back. After Rusty's paid new account policy, has decided to be less troll and contribute more to Kuro5hin. Orion likes to go against public opinion and play Devil's Advocate and debate the less popular side, in a way that is like trolling. Orion uses HST Gonzo Journalism and added it into his stories and diaries and comments, but lately is moving away from that. Orion suffers from schizoaffective disorder, and claims the voices in his head tell him what to post. Troll Hard had suffered a problem with his colon and needed surgery at the same time as Glenn Beck did, then later it was revealed that Troll Hard was Glenn Beck and the reason why Troll Hard had been away from Kuro5hin was that he was recovering from surgery. People are amazed that Glenn Beck and Troll Hard seem to share the same political reviews and also both suffered from suicidal thoughts. Previously people believed that he was Michael Crawford, until it was proven that he was Glenn Beck. Orion Blastar had a sense of humor going way back to July 2001 on Adequacy Warning us of a Terrorist Organization ready to strike the USA in one of his diaries. Seems like he tried to warn us about something?
