This month in the AJnet Archives: The AngryJerk.net Forums!
I’m finally doing it.
I’ve been teasing this since I started doing the AJnet Archives feature all the way back in March, and I would have done it sooner if it weren’t for two things.
The first, and most important thing, was figuring out how to talk about the AngryJerk.net Forums without giving away too much revealing information about the users and the stuff they posted. In 2012 I closed the forum off to new users and anyone who didn’t have an activated account couldn’t read the forum. Because of this, we became a little freer with what we’d post. A lot of it was complaining about our personal lives. I mean, like a shit ton of it. At least half of that was me, usually loaded off my ass and not in the best mental state. But others took part in this as well, so when considering an article about the AngryJerk.net Forums I had to figure out how to do this without sharing the personal information that I always promised I’d never share.
The second thing I had to contend with is the fact that I’m a damn idiot who didn’t properly back up the forum before deleting it for good.
After permanently closing the AngryJerk.net Forums down for good in late 2020, I decided to make a complete mirror of the forum and save it locally on a thumb drive. I forget what program I used to do this, but apparently this program didn’t actually save the entire forum, just the first few and last few pages of threads. I didn’t discover this fact until after I deleted the forums from the server because after making the mirror I only checked the first few pages of threads to make sure it worked, and assumed it downloaded the entire thing. As such, a good chunk of the forum is gone forever.
I also didn’t make database backups as frequently as I should have, the last phpBB backup I have is dated 2016. I could reupload this, but I’d still be missing four years of content.
So for this article, I’ll be going largely from memory, with some sporadic non-revealing screenshots mixed in where applicable. I’ll be mostly talking about the community and the stuff we did, making sure not to accidentally dox anyone. Any old forum members reading this, feel free to drop me a line if you want to correct me or even just say hi.
Fair warning, this will probably be one of my longer articles. There’s quite a bit to cover here, so I’ll be using subheadings to break things up a bit.
The AngryJerk.net Forums – The Beginning
I launched the forum in 2010, which as I’ve said before was the site’s most active year as far as readership goes.
I spent most of my teenage years posting on internet forums, and before that you’d find me rolling (and trolling) in chatrooms on AOL, Yahoo, and Jippii. I liked talking to people online, for the most part everyone was just there to have fun. The internet hadn’t yet become a total dumpster fire of try-hard trolls, political putzes, and overly-offended crybabies, so you could easily form long-term friendships with strangers thousands of miles away.
One day, I decided it was time to start my own forum. The site was getting traffic and I was a member of several communities, so I figured the time was right to try my hand at having my own forum. I looked into vBulletin at first, but they wanted money, and being a prep cook at a restaurant wasn’t exactly raking in the dough. I went with phpBB, the most popular free forum software available. I didn’t have any particular issue with phpBB, I just always thought vBulletin looked nicer and had better features.
I installed phpBB 2 on my server and played around with the templates until I came up with a charcoal black and red theme that matched the main site:
In July of 2010, I officially opened the AngryJerk.net Forums to the public:
The Early Years
The forum took off surprisingly quick, with the first member, Rogan, joining up within a week. Others soon followed, coming from both the main site and the other communities I frequented. A lot of people joined, made a few posts, then never came back. But quite a few people also stayed, like Rogan, Brex, FuckedYouFucker, LyingBastard, and SiliconKnight. These people would become some of my closest friends over time, and formed what I considered the forum’s “elite”. We routinely had nightly voice and video chats over Skype and TinyChat, where we did dumb shit (and I still had some hair left on my head):
Why were we shirtless so much? I honestly have no fucking clue.
There were also other regular members like Lanzar and Wingnut. I’ve previously talked about Lanzar, and he actually emailed me back in May to say hi. I was happy to hear that he was doing well for himself, lucky bastard got to drive a Lambo in Vegas and take a cross country trip.
I do have one Lanzar story that I didn’t share yet.
Lanzar had begun to annoy the majority of other members with his constant long rambling posts and repeatedly “quitting the forum” only to come back a week later with a new account. So I created a secret section of the forum called CENTCOM, and gave access permissions to every other user except Lanzar. If you weren’t part of the group, you wouldn’t even see the board on the forum index.
We originally used the CENTCOM board to coordinate trolling efforts against Lanzar, but we eventually moved on from him and CENTCOM became a general trolling board where we came up with targets and means of trolling them. One of our most notable efforts was against a girl I worked with who had a YouTube channel of herself singing pop songs. We bombarded her channel with a constant influx of hateful comments while pretending to be professional wrestlers. This ended with her in tears (I saw her crying about it at work one morning) and a certain American Idol contestant stepping in and threatening legal action against us on the girl’s behalf.
As for Wingnut, well, he was an interesting person to say the least.
A lot of the other users hated Wingnut. I personally didn’t hate him, but I definitely see why others did. Wingnut would routinely come to the forum drunk, kind of like myself. But unlike me, Wingnut was a more aggressive drunk, and would usually get into fights with other members, typically FuckedYouFucker (FYF). The Wingnut/FYF feud culminated in Wingnut posting his personal phone number and daring FYF to call him.
Well, FYF called him. And by that, I mean I called him during one of our nightly TinyChat sessions and pretended to be FYF (with FYF’s okay) while leaving Wingnut a drunken voicemail rambling about God knows what. The feud eventually died when I closed the forum off to the public and deactivated certain accounts, Wingnut’s being one of them. I hold no grudge against Wingnut, and I’m glad to see he still reads the site from time to time.
There were friends from other communities who joined up, including Sygma and Zack. Sygma and Zack were fellow members of a Maddox fan forum (longtime readers might remember Zack’s guest submissions to the site). Sygma really didn’t stick around too much, from what I remember she became busy with school. Zack however would show up sporadically and do fun things like take us out on his boat during a chat session:
It wasn’t unusual for us to stay up until 3 AM drinking, gaming, and generally bullshitting.
After two or three years, I’d achieved a regular user base of around ten people, which I thought was pretty cool all things considered. Most were readers of the site (like Rogan, Brex, LyingBastard, and FYF), but others were from other forums I frequented (Team Zack, Sygma, and Alan) or friends of other members (FlyingV/Rusty). The forum was very active, with dozens of new posts every day. AngryJerk.net officially had a community.
Closing the AngryJerk.net Forums to the Public
The first time I “retired from writing” in 2012, I disabled new user registrations and made the forum inaccessible to anyone without an account. I also deactivated certain accounts, like Wingnut’s. As I said before, I didn’t actually have a problem with the guy, but most of the other users did so I obliged them and didn’t let Wingnut stay.
This is what people without accounts who tried to access the forum would see:
Attempts to directly view a link to anywhere inside the forum would be met with this screen:
I would later change the index page to show this to any visitors without accounts (I also changed the color scheme):
Around this time I also made the update from phpBB 2 to phpBB 3, which necessitated a new theme:
This was also when I began calling them the “AJnet Forums”.
Since the forum was now unviewable to the public, we became a little more free with what we said. We used real names, talked about our personal lives, stuff like that. As I said at the beginning of the article, a good chunk of it was me drunkenly complaining about my personal life. We had become great friends and felt comfortable enough to share this sort of stuff with each other. My oversharing aside, the sense of camaraderie that the AJnet Forums had was great, and it’s one of the things I miss most from the past. I also invited some more people to the forum, including Bagoda and Drake from Rantlister, and my IRL friend Pyri.
During this time, we would do things like take each other’s pictures and make goofy memes with them that we shared with each other. We’d even do ourselves. Here’s an example I did with me:
It was all in good fun, but sometimes we’d cross the line and not know when to stop. In particular, FuckedYouFucker was an instance where we went a little too far.
FYF was the second person to register after Rogan, and had been reading the site since at least 2009 or 2010. He also had the tendency to oscillate between being cool and being weird. For example, he’d find some of the coolest YouTube videos ever (Emo Assault Squadron comes to mind), but then he’d turn around and try to argue about cars with Drake and SiliconKnight (who knew their shit when it came to cars). He also had a tendency to get into arguments with people like Pyri (who, being the fat stubborn Jew bastard he was, was always more than happy to throw down), then drag it all across the forum into every other thread. When he was cool, he was cool as fuck, but when he was annoying, well, let’s just say that I almost picked up the banhammer more than once.
One of his more notable quirks was not wanting his picture or name shared. He was afraid of his identity being made public, which was reasonable considering the kind of stuff we got up to on the forums. However, he flipped shit when one of us uploaded our meme with his face to TinyPic (I think it was TinyPic?) for hosting purposes. When Drake told him to calm down, he threatened to dox him and contact his employer (Drake was a nurse and already on thin ice with his employer for other things). FYF calmed down eventually, we apologized and promised to never use his name or image again. We didn’t keep to this though, and sometimes we’d purposely fuck with him by using his real name or his picture, which usually set him off.
One day FYF was having his usual arguments across the forum, and I was in a bad mood already. I was also very drunk and hopped up on liquor. I warned him to knock it off and threatened to ban him. He told me something to the effect of “Go ahead, I won’t miss this place”, so I banned him, then commented “YEAH WHAT NOW NIGGA TALK SHIT GET HIT”:
After a few months I felt kind of bad, but I was hesitant to unban him. I let it go for another year before putting the matter to a poll. I asked the other members if I should unban FYF and invite him back. Some supported it, but most were against it and some even threatened to leave if I let him back, mostly because of his previous threats to dox others. I never let FYF back on, though I did catch his IP address trying to access the forum more than once.
Looking back on it, maybe I was too much of an asshole to FYF. Yes, he did kind of overreact to stuff, yes, he was kind of annoying at times, yes, it was wrong for him to threaten to dox other members. But we weren’t necessarily in the right either. We repeatedly didn’t respect his wishes to stop using his picture and real name, we constantly provoked him, and we often went further with our jokes towards him than we should have. I know he reads this website still, and I’d like to say that I’m sorry for my part in being an asshole and drunkenly ending our friendship over petty bullshit. I really hope you’re doing well, FYF.
The Final Years
Banning FYF marked a lull in forum activity. Did the ban cause that lull? Probably not, but it certainly didn’t help things.
Forum activity had slowed down. Members who were previously very active gradually became less active. I chalk this up to us all getting older and finding lives outside of the internet. Most of us had responsibilities and obligations now, there wasn’t too much time to dick around on a small internet forum anymore. I had become the assistant manager at my supermarket deli job, which necessitated at least some maturity, sobriety, and a whole lot of responsibility. I reigned my drinking in and calmed down a lot, and began focusing on real life matters like my job and girlfriend. Others experienced similar life changes. By the end of 2018 we were down to only five regular posters, and even then most of those posts weren’t really anything of substance. Our discussions were mostly political in nature, much like the rest of the internet. The AJnet Forums, whose slogan had once been “Magic everywhere in this bitch”, had lost its magic. Slowly but surely, the posts became less frequent and most were empty and hollow responses that usually came from some sense of obligation.
Finally in August of 2020, I had enough. I closed the forum down for good, finally putting it out of its misery after 10 years. This was the last post I ever made on the forum, broken up into three separate images because WordPress sucks and insists on resizing large images:
With that final note, the AngryJerk.net Forums were closed.
After Closing
After I closed the forums down what little conversation there still was moved to Discord. Most people didn’t make the migration, only Brex, Rogan, and Drake. Pyri had Discord as well, but I just couldn’t get him to actually use it often. I left a link to the Discord server for any other forum members who wanted to join, but none ever did. I know some of them did log on to the forum at later points, so I’m guessing Discord just wasn’t their thing. I later closed down the Discord server since it was just as dead as the forum.
I still occasionally talk to Brex and Rogan, they’re both doing pretty good for themselves and are pretty busy with life. Pyri passed away in November of 2020 from complications related to his weight and COVID, and Drake passed away in September of 2021 from cirrhosis of the liver.
As for the rest of the crew, like Alan, Sygma, LyingBastard or SiliconKnight, I haven’t heard from them in years (though I did kind of chat with Alan briefly on Xbox Live not so long ago). I don’t know if any of them still read the site, but if they do I hope they’re all doing well in their lives. It was people like them that made the forum as fun as it was, and I wish that fun could have lasted forever.
Epilogue – The Return of the AJnet Forums
Back in February of this year, I impulsively decided to relaunch the AJnet Forums. It was mostly done as a joke, but part of me was curious to see how they’d do this time around.
They flopped, as I figured they would.
A couple of people did join, but they weren’t terribly active. I tried to get some of the other writers to join too and stimulate activity, but that was like pulling teeth. Most of the forum’s traffic consisted of bots from Russia and China, crawlers and spambots. Even though I did the whole thing as a joke, it was still pretty disheartening to see ten users online and nine of them being Russian and Chinese bots. After a month I shut it down, and the AJnet Forums went back to being just a memory.
Is there any future for the AJnet Forums? Probably not.
I’ve talked about this before, but I think we live in an age where most people would prefer to simply just consume content and move on rather than join a community and talk about stuff. And that’s fine, we at AJnet Magazine appreciate all of our readers regardless of whether or not they choose to comment on the articles (we appreciate the ones who comment more though). I honestly can’t blame anyone for not wanting to talk to people on the internet, every time I have to look at social media sites like Reddit I see nothing but insanity and toxicity. There’s no friendship, no common ground, no camaraderie. The internet of the 2000’s is dead, it’s gone, and it’s probably never coming back.
But it’s still fun to reminisce about, so I’ll keep doing that.
Anyway, I’ve done enough reminiscing here. For next month’s AJnet Archives article I’ll either be sharing an unfinished article about web forums, or republishing an old article about OkCupid. I also have a small trove of old fan mail, so I’ll probably be sharing that in the coming months as well.
Last Updated on October 19, 2024