AnonTalk
 Expect huge amounts of derp and rage, punctuated by /tg/ extracting humor from it. |
AnonTalk. Just the name brings seething fury to anyone remotely familiar with image boards. Along with infamous Civilization Clone/Spyware Bundle/Failure at Entertainment Evony, it was responsible for 4chan and the various other 2ch-style image boards instituting Captcha and various other anti-spam protocols that act as roadblocks for those of us who like to post in a quick and efficient fashion.
It started in the summer of 2006, where 4chan's owner/operator/admin/chief bottle-washer, moot, banned raids and pedophilia, for reasons that should be painfully obvious (I.E. he wanted to keep 4chan running). By and large, it was agreed that this was a good decision and that it was a perfectly reasonable rule to institute. About 6 months later, Kimmo Johan Alm, the man who would eventually found the scourge that became Anontalk, got banned from 4chan after spamming child porn. After bitching impotently to moot about it, he decided to create (what he felt) would be the most anonymous bulletin board system ever, ergo picking up the displaced traffic from 4chan who would want things the way they were before (I.E. rife with child pornography).
AnonTalk was legendary on not only the *chans, but on Wikipedia for delivering fucking enormous amounts of spam - the sheer volume delivered by AnonTalk was sufficient to paralyze every board on 4chan on several occasions, completely shut down Wikipedia twice, and completely offline at least 2 other 2ch-style boards (Desuchan and Bokuchan) for months. Every single person on the internet who has ever heard of AnonTalk has heard of it, specifically, because of this spam, in much the same way that every single person on the internet who has heard of Evony has through its insufferable flood of advertisements. Whilst advertised as the last bastion of free speech on the tubernets, the site itself amounted to nothing more than a meet-and-greet site for internet predators and child molesters run by a delusional, grammar-obsessed control freak who banned anyone who disagreed with him (like we said, "free speech").
This eventually led to its destruction.
Suffice to say, it's one of the most justifiably-hated things on every image board ever.
Pedophile Safe Haven
AnonTalk was notorious for housing pedophiles.
Dozens of them.
You know the time 4chan's /b/ trolled the Oprah Winfrey show?
Imagine if that was serious, and you get the general idea of how loathsome the userbase of AnonTalk was.
Most of the content was mixed between pedophilia, discussion on underaged girls, brief mentions of lolicon, and various in-depth discussions on how to molest children. We are not making this shit up. Several polls on the site indicated that many of the users with children have raped or molested their own kids (including at least one thread in telling others how to molest their own children), or want to.
Even by the staggering standards of the internet, these people were vile, disgusting, and horrific... And the centerpiece of the abomination that was AnonTalk.
Retaliation
Born out of a pretentious desire to profit off all of the 0.0001% of users who disagreed with the ruling on 4chan: Check. Pedophile Central: Check. Run by an egomaniac who banned people for arbitrary and often nonsensical reasons? Check. Spamming the Fuck Out of Every ImageBoard on the Web: Check.
The users of the tubernets were not happy with AnonTalk's bullshit, and a price would be paid in digital blood.
AnonTalk's offenses against the internets were too egregious to take lying down - communities organized, and retaliated in droves, contacting AnonTalk's hosts and showing them the sort of content on AnonTalk - many of these hosts cancelled on AnonTalk in response. Others, more enterprising and skilled, reported AnonTalk to search engine sites and the FBI. Appropriately, there were immediate investigations, and AnonTalk started to bleed money and support. Spam from AnonTalk peaked during this time, as Kimmo Alm desperately tried to draw new users in for the oh-so-important revenue AnonTalk needed to keep running.
The war escalated, and more grimdark users of the *chans committed to the battle with further host reports, counter-operative actions against AnonTalk, and actively cloning AnonTalk's coding, functionally making it so that a version of AnonTalk minus the pedophilia and insanity emerged. And then, finally, as if to drop the hammerblow to end the fight, moot and numerous other *chan Admins instituted a Captcha system.
Spam from AnonTalk stopped overnight. AnonTalk was dead within a year and a half, as the sheer number of reports ensured that no web hosting company would ever agree to host the site. And nothing of value was lost.
A Brief Sample of Evidence
Don't believe us? Let us enlighten you:
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A User Wants to Find a Way to Lure in Underaged Girls.
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When what you posted makes FATAL seem normal, seek fucking help.
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FREE CP, Y'ALL
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AnonTalk's Hot Topics List. One of these things is not like the others.
These are just the ones we can show you, really.