whatthefuck.com exists out of time, from a different era with different priorities. launched in 1999, wtf was designed as a bbs on the internet — a place where people could post to message boards, chat with each other, make friends, and talk shit. in some ways, it was social networking before that became a term, but really, it was a town square for people tilted a little to the side.
back then, you couldn't even register a domain with "fuck" in it. the sole registrar had morality clauses that somehow allowed sexually explicit domain names but drew the line at profanity. when new registrars were finally allowed, we were in on day one.
outzider and abdul quickly whipped together a basic web site — message boards, a really crappy chat system, and personals — on a very shoddy, caffeine enabled pile of perl.
(not a lot has changed.)
to be honest, we never expected so many people to show up. in the first week, a few thousand users came in and tested the limits of our little site. by the end of the first month, we had nearly 5,000 subscribers and a brief month-and-a-half outage because we were too much for our hosting provider. once back up, the users came pouring in, and the rest was history.
over the years, founders stepped away, interest waned, the site went through several rewrites. we gained stability, lost features, and mostly exist now to serve as a monument to another era — still here, still talking shit, still tilted a little to the side.
hosted in ontario, canada. built and running with typescript, nestjs, nextjs, react, shadcn, postgresql, redis, kubernetes, spite, and pain.
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