why are we here?

whatthefuck.com exists out of time, from a different era with different priorities. opening in the old days of the internet, somewhere around 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, find a date, 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.

whatthefuck.com was registered on the morning of july 9, 1999, otherwise known as one long time ago. back then, there was only one domain registrar, and they had morality clauses. those were loose, see, there were plenty of sexually explicit domain names, but you sure could not say fuck. this company, network solutions, received no more of our money. when new registrars were allowed in 1999, we were in on day one.

domain in hand, outzider and abdul quickly whipped together a basic web site -- including the absolute bare minimum of e-mail support, message boards, a really crappy chat system, and personals -- on a very shoddy, caffeine enabled pile of perl.

(not a lot has changed.)

we launched on october 7, 1999. to be honest, we never expected to have so many people interested, but there you all were. in the span of a week, we saw a few thousand users come in and test the limits of our little site. we didn't have a database, we didn't have an elaborate email system, and we were limited to about 100mb of disk space. things changed pretty fast. by november of that year, we had nearly 5,000 subscribers. we had a "brief" month and a half outage at the end of the year as we were too much for our little hosting provider. once back up, the users came pouring in, and the rest was history.

a lot of time has passed, with one of the founders stepping away from things, and another losing interest over time. the site went through several major rewrites over time, gaining stability, losing e-mail, and mostly exists to serve as a monument to another era.