Kuro5hin
Kuro5hin (K5) (pronounced kuro-FIVE-hin) is a "gated dysfunctional community" [1] 
(archive) for people far removed from the real world and who tend to wallow in their own shit inside the "diary ghetto."[2] (archive) 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. Members of Kuro5hin.org prefer to refer to him as Blonde Nature Faggot.
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 others' 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.
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 then 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 Lunix 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.
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.
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 imageFile:Rustina.jpg showing Rusty Foster's wife having sex with a black person. 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".[3] 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.[4] 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 [5] and is an editor at Kuro5hin.
On September 08, 2007, Rusty decides to make Kuro5hin a paid site. [6] 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 [7] 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 November 5, 2007, trhurler, one of the first and most active K5 users ever, died.[8]
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.
A rather-clever kuro5hin.org troll wrote the following java script to aid in the mass-rating of comments. On a user's comment page, paste this into your address bar. You will be prompted for the rating (0-3) and then it will commence rating.
Annoying the admins, this is an unwritten rule but Rusty and the admins go by it. If a member annoys the admins enough, they will ban the account. Anyway later in September 11, 2007 one of the admins let the rest of Kuro5hin in on the unwritten rule. [9]
Kuro5hin is full of good people with a strange and weird sense of humor. Sort of like a Friars Roast that makes fun of each others as trolls use humor a lot.
K5 is dying DEAD
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.
In March 2010 Kuro5hin is still dying but some non-notable users are buying $5 accounts and $10 advertisement to give Rusty Foster some beer money. This is a schizoaffective plot to get Rusty so drunk that he will finish the cancel bug problem and make Scoop rival Facebook, MySpace, and Google with Web 3.0 3D/4D Zero-G M-Theory Super String computing Cyberspace abilities mentioned in the Cyberpunk book 'Neuromancer". Rusty Foster just invented the neruojack interface and uses the "Trollwatch" technology to cancel unwanted stories from the queue. It is not known if this plan will work, or if the second coming of Michael Crawford as Johnathan Swift with his Software Problem web site will fix things.
In May 2016, Kuro5hin was closed and the domain was sold for that juicy backlinks revenue.
Notable Users
- Rusty Foster(rusty), (archive) Kuro5hin's founder
- Andy Zebrowitz (kitten), Kuro5hin's village idiot, now deceased. (archive)
- Roger Williams (localroger), (archive) unpublished writer of science fiction stories featuring incestuous pedophilia
- Michael Crawford (MichaelCrawford), aka Rippit the Ogg Frog, and Johnathan Swift, unemployed computer programmer suffering from schizoaffective disorder, software consultant, musician, artist, poet, white hat SEO ninja, writer, GNU Dirty Hippie writing open source software that is vaporware like Ogg Frog and Duke Nukem Forever.
- 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
See Also
- Unrealistic expectations
- Unwarranted Self-Importance
- Troll
- Crapflooding
- Zero Bombing
- Tollocaust
- Homosexuality
- Flamers
- Internets
External Links
http://www.kuro5hin.orgKuro5hin's former URL- Unofficial user statistics