ED = finally dead?

[Jim Demintia]

Looks like Encyclopedia Dramatica is finally dead.

Hey everyone,

We have some things that we need to take care of, but we will be back soon. While you are waiting, please check out our new blog and join our mail list.

Thank you for your fealty,

ED

I really doubt they'll be back. I believe the only reason the site was kept online as long as it  was was because it probably had pretty good Google rankings which allowed for some advertising revenue to be extracted from it. If the owner(s) can't extract that revenue stream anymore, there'll be little motivation to bring it back.

[Pi]

I dunno. If they weren't going to come back, I assume they would come out and say so.

OTOH they haven't been funny, useful, or relevant for the greater part of the past 4 years. Maybe it's time, y'know?

[Jim Demintia]

Well, their Twitter says it's just new servers being deployed "over the next 12 hours" but weirdly almost this exact same thing happened back in January. ED went down, Gawker reported on it citing rumours that it was going to be shut down, then it came back up. Very odd that this should happen again. It's been twelve hours since that Twitter post (account ED_Official, sorry on the phone right now) and all the messages since then are trying to promote a site called "Oh Internet" which is also linked to from the ED message.

I dunno; it's gotta be hideously burdensome to run a site like ED. We all laugh off "internet lawsuits" but ED pissed off so many different people at the very least the threat of litigation or complaints to the ISP must have been a headache. The ad revenue probably made it worth it for a while; but I gather earlier this year several prominent pages were wiped to make the site more hospitable to advertisers. May have been the math just didn't work anymore.

[Freehaven]

I gather earlier this year several prominent pages were wiped to make the site more hospitable to advertisers.

I know for a fact that the article on noted nutjob Betawolf was deleted; I believe Jessica Elwood's was, too.

[Jim Demintia]

I don't really want to veer into speculation territory but I believe that a lot of furry articles were deleted as a part of a "clean up" drive. What I'm talking about is stuff like the pages on Jews and, well, black people...stuff that's mainstream offensive and likely to drive away advertisers. Also, there was that human rights complaint in Australia that got some Internet news coverage. Stuff that was sort of borderline unfunny and probably written by actual, non-ironic racists but was kept under the banner of "nothing is holy".

I began noticing they had a bot doing find/replaces on certain words...a certain offensive word for black person, and others around the beginning of the year. I started digging around and lots of people were complaining about it...but there seemed to be certain admins who were aware of what was going on but had little to say about it other than "this is the way it is, deal with it". It really screwed up the flow of some articles too, and sometimes people who cared about the article fixed it, other times, no. It was at that point I began to wonder if ED may not be on it's way out.

I really think it's probably too much of a burden on whoever owns it, for too little reward. I'm not saying they're not planning to come back, they may be. I'd honestly not be surprised if this was the end of ED, is all.

[Conan]

If you're a clever person you can find the ED forums are still up however they seem to have been spammed with this "Oh Internet" thing prior to the subdomain being redirected.

Interestingly enough, their images.encyclopediadramatica.net subdomain is still active and still serving content. It's also hosted on a completely separate server.

[gnpg]

While you could never quite trust the content of any ED article on furries - except where screenshots were involved - if someone ended up with an article there, it was usually a damn good indicator of specific people in the fandom to stay away from. I'll miss that - but not anything else.

[Jim Demintia]

Well, there's this:

Update on downtime. Move and new installs done by Friday morning. Hang in there. Check the blog blog.ohinternet... & follow @O_Internet

I suppose it's still possible that they're going to come back...all of this "odd" stuff could be just stuff...who knows. It's just an exceedingly odd way to handle a server move and upgrade.

Guess we'll have a better idea Friday.

While you could never quite trust the content of any ED article on furries - except where screenshots were involved - if someone ended up with an article there, it was usually a damn good indicator of specific people in the fandom to stay away from. I'll miss that - but not anything else.

While it is true that people you should stay away from often had ED articles, it was not always true that people with ED articles were worthy of staying away from. There were/are a lot of furs, and just people too, who end up with ED articles simply because they got involved in drama somewhere where there were people with too much time and an ED account.

[Conan]

Well, there's this:

Update on downtime. Move and new installs done by Friday morning. Hang in there. Check the blog blog.ohinternet... & follow @O_Internet

I suppose it's still possible that they're going to come back...all of this "odd" stuff could be just stuff...who knows. It's just an exceedingly odd way to handle a server move and upgrade.

After seeing the ongoing trainwreck known as "Fur Affinity", nothing about this ED thing looks odd at all.

[Jim Demintia]

The redirect has changed...and now any encyclopediadramatica.com link redirects to "ohinternet.com", which appears to be a wiki...in fact one quite a bit like ED, but one that is "SFW" according to the "Oh Internet 101" page.

The redirect appears semi-intelligent—type in a URL to an ED article and in some cases it tries to bring up an Ohinternet.com article with the same name.

No it only does that for history pages (i.e. "title=foo&action=history" MediaWiki URLs)

[Conan]

Well it was supposed to be back by "Friday morning", and that's come and gone.

Anonymous is planning a DDoS.

[Jim Demintia]

The way this was handled only serves to re-inforce my idea that this is about money, or specifically, ad revenue. That redirect probably aims to preserve the encyclopediadramatica.com domain's PageRank while serving content from a far more advertiser-friendly site. If the content of the old ED were hosted anywhere, slowly this new site would lose it's popularity to the "new ED", thus thwarting such a scheme.

People are greedy S.O.B's, and while this was a shitty move, you have to remember that you weren't exactly dealing with honest and forthright folks at ED. I really doubt there's any significant archival out there--in fact, now that I think about it--the excuse of downtime could have been a way to allow the Google cache to expire without anyone suspecting something was up--so this is probably, in fact, the end of ED.

The lawsuit threat is laughable, though, and I'd almost have to think made in bad faith. Suing someone for copyright violation on the content of ED is almost inherently a joke. That site's stock in trade was copyright violation, and all any lawyer has to do is point out that the owners don't actually have clear copyright ownership of the majority of the site's content--then the options become give up or pay lots of lawyers lots of money to sift through various Goatse photoshops and screen captures of /b/ to determine ownership of all of it.

[ProvincialTwit]

Wait, Anon is planning to DDOS them?  Granted, ED was at its most useful as an archive of chan memes and Anon goings-on but that seems like a bit much.

Haha just kidding that's hilarious.

Also ED at least had better quality control than Urbandictionary or its ilk.  Which, I realize, isn't saying much, but still.

Also thanks to this thread we're getting absolute shit tons of referral hits from The Goog.  Apparently there are an awful lot of people who really want to know what's going on over there.

[Conan]

Wait, Anon is planning to DDOS them?  Granted, ED was at its most useful as an archive of chan memes and Anon goings-on but that seems like a bit much.

Haha just kidding that's hilarious.

Also ED at least had better quality control than Urbandictionary or its ilk.  Which, I realize, isn't saying much, but still.

Also thanks to this thread we're getting absolute shit tons of referral hits from The Goog.  Apparently there are an awful lot of people who really want to know what's going on over there.

There was a DDoS going on for a while, but then it was announced that a group of researchers had scraped ED back in February and had an archive of 9401 pages complete with wiki markup.

Which means it's back (for now).

[ColeTrain]

Wait, Anon is planning to DDOS them?  Granted, ED was at its most useful as an archive of chan memes and Anon goings-on but that seems like a bit much.

Haha just kidding that's hilarious.

Also ED at least had better quality control than Urbandictionary or its ilk.  Which, I realize, isn't saying much, but still.

Also thanks to this thread we're getting absolute shit tons of referral hits from The Goog.  Apparently there are an awful lot of people who really want to know what's going on over there.

There was a DDoS going on for a while, but then it was announced that a group of researchers had scraped ED back in February and had an archive of 9401 pages complete with wiki markup.

Which means it's back (for now).

Let's see if ED's original founders do go through with that lawsuit threat when they see this.

[Jim Demintia]

On the OH Internet talk pages, they are claiming that: a) they did this because they couldn't control the quality of ED articles the way they wanted to, and b) that it isn't a clone of Know Your Meme, as many people are saying.

I can buy (a), even though it really doesn't refute anything anyone is saying (it can be true along with any and all of the other stuff), but (b) is bullshit. They tried this a while ago with a site called WhatPort80, which was spammed onto ED pages as a "SFW" and "you can show your friends" version of ED articles. That obviously went nowhere, but the founders clearly see the profit potential in such a thing, so they decided to take away ED, since that was getting in the way of people caring about their new site.

It's obviously intended to reach a far wider, and more advertiser-appealing, audience. Whatever else it may be is probably not relevant.

Anyway, the Internet news sites are starting to pick up on this here and there. Particularly delicious is this quote from Sherrod DeGrippo, who owns Oh Internet and owned ED:

"OhInternet considers the entire internet worthy of documenting, which includes mobile apps, startup execs, programmers, subcultures, events and yes, memes too. The users make the decisions on that, not shareholders or a board of directors. OhInternet is something I take very personally. We don’t have paid staff or writers or any employees, we DIY everything and I’m in there every single day, creating content myself and am available on our IRC network.”

I'm willing to bet they were not counting on those researchers, though. That may very well throw a serious kink into their attempts to remove ED as a competitor in terms of Google PageRank.

[Conan]

OhInternet is offline after being hacked. All of Sherrod's passwords were posted to her personal website and the entire user table from the ED forums has been leaked.

Another "you shouldn't mess with Anonymous" moment, I guess.

[Jim Demintia]

The new ED is "meh". I looked at it today, or the parts that would have changed anyway (such as the ED article itself), and to the extent anyone had a valid complaint about the quality of articles beforehand it seems to be just as much if not more of a problem now.

I think it's pretty clear from any cursory research...especially now that everyone's gone and dug up info on Sherrod DeGrippo (info that was out there but not real visible), that DeGrippo is a shitty businessperson and one of those "serial LLC" types. OHi will not last long. That the stunt with ED was required to make anyone even notice it kind of gives you an idea of how bereft they are of ideas in an already-crowded genre.

We don't really know all that much about the owners of the new ED. So what will become of that is an open question, especially since as far as I can tell they are running no ads whatsoever, nor are they asking for donations beyond helping to rebuild the wiki. I believe I saw somewhere that they'd been served with a DMCA, but if their hosting is foreign, it's likely they have an ISP who will ignore such things. It was still up this afternoon.

I think if anything, the observant person should have learned something from this, if they didn't know it already. That "Anonymous" is as human as anything else, and as such there are people looking to take advantage, profiteer, scam, and screw over just about anyone they can for personal gain. The characters involved with ED were actual criminals, in some cases. Seems like people have this idea that on the Internet, people have a different set of motivations for stuff than they do offline. They don't. Remember that.

[ProvincialTwit]

And on that note I'd like to inform our audience that Vivisector is switching to a subscription-based service for all users effective immedia...oh wait no that's a fucking stupid idea.  Welp, chalk up yet another popular website that we're 'better than' :3

[Conan]

I believe I saw somewhere that they'd been served with a DMCA, but if their hosting is foreign, it's likely they have an ISP who will ignore such things. It was still up this afternoon.

http://encyclopediadramatica.ch/Encyclopedia_Dramatica:Hall_of_Lawfags

Apparently Sherrod has sent multiple DMCAs to remove photographs of her along with some of the information on her page.