shock site

A shock site is a website that is intended to be offensive or disturbing to most of its viewers, containing shocking material which is considered distasteful and crude, and is generally of a pornographic, scatological, or extremely violent nature. In most cases, a shock site displays a single picture, some shock sites also show animations or galleries of images, shock sites are often passed around via email or disguised in posts to discussion sites as a hoax in an attempt to trick readers into following the link to the website.

The news and discussion site Slashdot has changed its software (Slash) to display the domain name of a linked URL in brackets following the link (example: "Click Here [example.com]"), so that any link to goatse.cx or a similar shock site would be immediately visible as such. The change has been effective in reducing the number of links to shock sites even though trolls began to set up mirror sites and use public CGI redirect scripts run by sites such as Yahoo! in an attempt to circumvent the measure.

Examples of shock sites

Goatse.cx

Goatse.cx, was one of the best-known shock sites that existed, featuring an image, hello.jpg, of a man stretching his anus with his hands. This same image was formerly called the "shock3r" , and has been featured on various hacked sites. The link to these sites was primarily spread through IRC.

The original domain goatse.cx was pointed to www.blackraven.cx (masked in an HTML frame) by the NIC .cx authority in January 2004, but several mirrors sites are currently up and running hosting the original content (including goatse.ch, goatse.fr, as well as goatse.cz which also manages to preserve some of the original phonetic appeal).

Tubgirl.com

Tubgirl.com was a redirect to a picture, tubgirl.jpg, containing a masked, naked woman lying in a bathtub, buttocks raised with her legs over her head, projecting a fountain of orange/yellow liquid from her anus onto her face. Before the launch of tubgirl.com, this image was featured in a rotten.com story "Fecal Japan" claiming that the subject matter is allegedly popular in Japan. The image displayed on tubgirl.com is marked as having been previously posted on Consumption Junction. The URL address www.tubgirl.com now redirects to Consumption Junction, and displays the image with a "rate me" box, where viewers can rate the image from 1 to 10.

BallSack.org

Ballsack.org Is one of the largest collections of disturbing images/videos on the internet. The website features an open directory with over 1500 files and has been known for it's wide variety of content. All of the content is either submitted by staff or anonymously (email).

Ogrish.com

Ogrish.com was a shock site that showed pictures of domestic incidents such as car crashes, murders, and other accidents. It also hosted images from the Iraq War, other conflicts, and acts of terror. Due to the nature of the content of Ogrish.com, it had been banned in Germany.

The media hosted on Ogrish.com was, according to the manager of the site Dan Klinker, retrieved by the sites staff, or was submitted freelance by emergency workers and others who had access to such media. Ogrish.com used scripts that monitored jihadist websites for uploads of videos and images, and also crawled the internet for footage.

Examples of popular material on the site included the decapitation of American contractor Nick Berg, which had been downloaded fifteen million times, the execution of a Russian soldier in Chechnya, and the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. According to the site, average daily hits ranged in the low hundred thousand, and sometimes rose to 750,000 on a news day.

Other shock sites

• One item on Rotten.com contains an image of a Scarlet Macaw perched on a man's erect penis. The page contains a note from a Slashdot reader asking that the image be relocated (if not removed) because Slashdot trolls are using hyperlinks to send unsuspecting users there. The page also mentions a crude ASCII art version, which appears from time to time on Slashdot.

Former shock sites

• Rustina.org contained a falsified picture of Rusty Foster's wife having sex with another man, as well as a fictional account of the story behind the picture. It is the picture that caused Rusty to temporarily shut down new user sign ups on his website, Kuro5hin. The site was taken down as of December 2, 2006.

• ShrewsburyCollege.co.uk was a site containing a photograph of two men, one being anally penetrated by the other with what appeared to be a bicycle pump. In addition, both were covered in feces. The name of the site was taken from the Shrewsbury College of Arts & Technology, which used to be known by the acronym SCAT. The website has now been replaced by the actual Shrewsbury College website. This shock site was perhaps the only one to have appeared in a print newspaper, featuring in a front-page article of the Shrewsbury Chronicle on 8 December 2005. In the aforementioned article, the MP for Shrewsbury & Atcham, Daniel Kawczynski, mentioned that the site was brought to his attention by a fellow Member of Parliament. The visitor logs of what are presumably the reporter that wrote the story, and Kawczynski are available to view online.

See also

• Computer prank
• Internet troll
• NSFW

External links

• A list of shock sites from BluWiki

References

This article contains content from Wikipedia. Current versions of the GNU FDL article Shock site on WP may contain information useful to the improvement of this article

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