- Joined
- Jul 9, 2022
"Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED or æ; stylized as Encyclopædia Dramatica) is an online community website, centered around a wiki, that acts as a "troll archive" and its community members frequently participate in harassment campaigns. The site hosts racist material and shock content..." -Wikipedia, on Encyclopedia Dramatica
"ED is...the final arbiter of truth and human destiny, and can be used to settle any dispute, anywhere, evar and a wiki-encyclopedia that enjoys deep web benefits." -Encyclopedia Dramatica, on itself
While the site is almost complete dead due to its history of terrible admins and constant domain hopping, it stands as a relic to a time where one could host a site on Internet drama without having Tier 1 ISPs unilaterally attempt to censor you.
The Beginning: Sherrod DeGrippo / girlvinyl
(Pictured Left: Sherrod DeGrippo/girlvinyl)
ED was started by Sherrod DeGrippo in 2004, primarily to document drama that was circulating in a LiveJournal community that she was a part of. Her and other members of the "LJdrama" community would specifically target and harass a man by the name of Joshua Williams (known online as mediacrat), a person whom ED describes as a "mentally unstable homosexual" in their article on DeGrippo (a). Williams had been involved in a homosexual relationship with a LJ user named Andrewpants. Their relationship was brief, but after they split up they soon got into drama as "fatty" pictures of Williams were posted (allegedly) by Andrewpants and spread around the web. Williams was so personally offended that at one point he actually traveled to Portland, Oregon to speak directly to LiveJournal's abuse team about getting the photos removed.
Finding this turn of events particularly lulzy (and having been banned from LiveJournal), DeGrippo and her LJdrama compatriots attempted to document all of this on Wikipedia, but were unsuccessful due to Wikipedia's strict standards on article quality. Thus, DeGrippo founded ED specifically as a place to document LiveJournal drama. The site exploded in popularity overnight and soon grew to encompass a wide variety of Internet drama outside the scope of LiveJournal.
ED was almost completely unmoderated and soon attained an abysmal reputation for its rampant racism, homophobia, sexism, and every -phobia and -ism you can think of. It even made mainstream news, with the New York Times describing it as an "online compendium of troll humor and troll lore" (a) in 2008. Wired spoke of the site in 2009 as a "vast parallel universe of Anonymous in-jokes, catchphrases, and obsessions is lovingly annotated, and you will discover an elaborate trolling culture: Flamingly racist and misogynist content lurks throughout, all of it calculated to offend, along with links to eye-gougingly horrific images of mutilation, sexual perversity, and, yes, kittens in blenders." News articles at the time also claimed that ED had massive overlap with 4chan in userbase and sense of humor.
ED's reputation soon earned it a deindexing from Google in 2010 after some abbo bitched (a) about their Aboriginal article that described them as the "niggers of Australia." (a) Perhaps due to this incident (and the fact that the website was never profitable because they couldn't run ads), DeGrippo decided she was done with ED and wanted to move on.
ED's 9/11
The shutdown of Encyclopedia Dramatica in 2010 is a foundational myth in ED lore. DeGrippo, having decided she was sick of wrangling a community of abrasive retards for no benefit, took all of the content offline and made the ED domain redirect to OhInternet.com, a new business venture of hers that promised to be more safe-for-work. In an e-mail interview with Gawker's Adrien Chen (who still has an article (a) on ED to this very day), DeGrippo outlined why she felt the need to kill ED in favor of OhInternet:
(Pictured: OhInternet's front page as of October 17, 2011)
https://web.archive.org/web/20111017001542/http://ohinternet.com/Main_Page
OhInternet, to put it simply, was a knowyourmeme ripoff, and the native userbase of ED wanted nothing to do with it. The site's Facebook page was flooded with hate messages, porn, gore, etc. and the disgruntled EDiots quickly worked to put the old site back together from old archives and Google caches, as DeGrippo was completely unwilling to release any archives of the old site.
The move to OhInternet was especially insidious because ED users were actually already working on their own SFW meme wiki called WhatPort80 (a). Many ED users were even working on cleaning up existing ED articles so that they could be used on the new SFW site. When DeGrippo suddenly pulled the plug on ED, WhatPort80 went with it. While much ED content was restored in the aftermath of its destruction through archives and caches, WhatPort80 content was lost forever, and DeGrippo could not be bothered to port any of it over to OhInternet.
You can find a snapshot of the front page of WhatPort80 on the Internet Archive. A portal to a simpler time.
Over a decade later, ED users still despise DeGrippo for this move and feature an article about her to this day, containing pictures of her bare ass and a photoshopped image of her sucking on a black man's cock.
For posterity, I link this image from her article that gives you ED's retelling of the founding of their website and the war over OhInternet:
(DeGrippo would attempt to DMCA her article, but the DMCA was countered and she later admitted defeat (a) on reddit.)
In modern times, DeGrippo thrives in her professional life (a) as Director of Threat Intelligence Strategy at Microsoft, making no mention of ED or OhInternet on any of her social media profiles. Perhaps more relevant is the fact that she's managed to lose a lot of weight, as seen in this more recent photo:
Life After Death: Zaiger's Adminship
(Pictured: Brian Richard Zaiger, former owner of ED)
After DeGrippo's grip was loosened from ED, a new owner was needed. Ryan Cleary, who you may know as a member of the hacker group Lulzsec, was made admin of the site. Cleary was soon arrested for his involvement in the hacker group, and the position somehow defaulted to a man named Brian Richard Zaiger.
I will mostly defer to Encyclopedia Dramatica themselves for this section. Usually this would be a stupid idea because so much of the content on ED is unsourced or even entirely fabricated (which I will elaborate on later), but their retelling of events involving Zaiger has been corroborated by other sources. Count Dankula even made a video about Zaiger:
Local archive of video:
And you can read the article on Zaiger here (a).
I will not go over everything, as Dankula's video and the article do a better job than I ever could. I will instead summarize the lulziest parts of Zaiger's reign of terror from 2013-2017:
- Zaiger was completely computer illiterate and possessed none of the skills to run a website, let alone a wiki. Despite this, he would constantly try to make changes to the site that broke it and the site's admins would have to scramble to fix it. This led to many admins leaving in 2014.
- Under his reign, Zaiger flooded the site with porn and virus ads because those ads paid out the most money. The site was completely unusable for multiple years without adblock.
- According to staff member ILoveJesus69, Zaiger was impossible to get ahold of, and when he was around, he was blackout drunk at all times. He gave technical access to unproven people who "treated the production environment like a classroom lab" and caused vulnerabilities in the site that got it put on spam blacklists and exposed the userbase email list.
- When lolcows contacted ED asking for articles about themselves to be removed, Zaiger would offer to remove the content in exchange for money, and would even make them site admins and moderators if they paid enough.
- Zaiger would also do this for women who flirted with him, including one woman who was openly married.
- At one point, the Encyclopedia Dramatica Forum (EDF) was hacked because Zaiger changed the root password to the forum database to niggers1.
- The site suffered multiple shutdowns, once when Zaiger fired an admin who was pivotal to keeping the site up, and another when he changed the site's ICANN "name" field to Daniel Brandt, a longtime opponent of ED. When Brandt heard about this, he simply called ED's webhost and asked for the site to be shut down.
- Zaiger had his own imagehost, a shitty anonymous PHP clone of imgur named anonmgur made from GPL licensed code that he stole. The site hosted a shit load of child porn that Zaiger was not bothered by and strongly resisted removing until several admins threatened to quit over it.
- Zaiger would take all of the site's donation money and spend it on booze and meth, then cry and beg to random users and admins about not having enough money to pay server bills.
- To compound his monetary woes, Zaiger was sued by Johnny Monsarrat for ignoring multiple DMCA notices from his lawyer. The case was dismissed with prejudice, but Zaiger hired a retardedly expensive lawyer to fight it and racked up over 100,000 USD in legal fees that he had to pay himself.
(Pictured: Zaiger as of 2021)
Life after Zaiger
Ever since Zaiger, ED has had a series of different, less notable admins. The one that immediately succeeded Zaiger, Conrad Alan Rockenhaus (a), was arrested just seven months after taking over due to attempting to sabotage a former employer, causing the site to go down in 2020. ED's latest string of admins are generally various flavors of incompetent and retarded, leading to the site constantly going down, jumping from provider to provider and domain name to domain name. The Encyclopedia Dramatica Forums in particular have gone through seven different iterations due to data loss from site shutdowns (and one from when Zaiger just deleted the entire forum.) They have also suffered domain seizures because nobody ever listens to Null.
In general, the last few years of the site's life have been something like this:
As of writing, the current domain name is edramatica.com. I cannot find who the current admin of ED is.
The Content of Encyclopedia Dramatica
As mentioned prior, the content hosted on Encyclopedia Dramatica is crass, juvenile, and full of all of the icky -isms and -phobias you're probably used to on this site by now. They essentially have zero rules and will openly post gore and porn with zero censorship or forewarning. This naturally attracts a certain kind of lunatic community that is often detrimental to the health of a site.
Perhaps the most infamous example of this is ED's Offended page; a simple article that starts off with cute images of animals and slowly becomes a collection of pornography and gore as you scroll down. Basically, any article on ED reads pretty much like this:
ED is also an unreliable source for internet drama because they have no sourcing policy at all. Every article is full of grand claims and exaggerations that are rarely ever backed by actual evidence.
Sometimes ED editors will literally just make shit up, like this part in the Null/Joshua Connor Moon article that is intermixed with actual, legitimate information about Null's old BL drama:
(a)
The proof for this being some shit some guy made up:
Many of the articles on the site go unmaintained for years, with some being so old that they still use outdated Internet colloquialisms such as "what is this I can't even" and "lulz".
EDF: Dramatica Farms
Encyclopedia Dramatica has their own forum colloquially known as EDF by the userbase.
The most immediate and interesting feature of EDF is how many sites they've been through. According to the official EDF article (a), they have been through seven iterations of EDF (they claim there's an EDF7 but the current forum is called EDF6 everywhere else.)
The timeline is basically:
- EDF1: Original site forums, died during the OhInternet debacle. Used vBulletin, which ED calls a "steaming pile of shit" (which is correct)
- EDF2: Site forums run during the Reign of Zaiger. Got hacked to shit after three months of being up because he made the password to access the database niggers1, exposing everyone's emails. Used based XenForo.
- EDF2.9 and 2.99: I cannot find any information on these. I presume this was EDF2 while Rockenhaus was running it. EDF2 was destroyed after Rockenhaus went to jail and the site went down because ED admins are allergic to backups for some reason.
- EDF5: "PHPBB abortion" edition made by Jacob Stellmach (see below for more information.) For some reason he decided to use phpBB for the forum software, which is made of abysmal, shitty hacked legacy code. Due to phpBB not having the same inherent security systems built-in that XF did, the site was flooded with bots and had zero actual users.
- EDF6: As far as I can tell, the current forums. Uses based XenForo again.
Other Notable EDiots
William Atchinson / FuckYou / AlGore / MrApophis / SatanicDruggie / "Couch Cuck"
(Pictured: William Atchinson)
Known to ED as AlGore (and to this site as @FuckYou), Atchinson was an edgy boy born on March 18, 1996. According to ED, he registered an account with them at the ripe age of 11 and proceeded to rot his brain with their particular brand of ironic detachment over the next decade. Atchinson was also an ED SysOp.
Atchinson was a loner who had few friends in real life due to his neuroticism. According to Wikipedia, he was suspended from Aztec High School in 2012 for writing an account of the Columbine High School Massacre, an incident that was not reported to the school's SRO. Generally, he was antisocial and spent most of his time online posting on ED and Kiwi Farms and making many enemies. Almost every post he ever made on anything contains death/rape threats, slurs, swearing, and more. Here are some posts from him:
Despite using usernames like "Future Mass Shooter" and even being in close contact with David Sonboly, an ACTUAL MASS SHOOTER, the FBI's investigation into Atchinson in 2016 came up empty because he told the agents involved that the post he made asking for cheap weapons to commit a mass shooting with was "just trolling."
Atchinson has an article on ED (a) about him and the shooting he perpetrated. I will let them take it from here:
Reportedly, two weeks before the shooting, Atchinson's father told him "don't shoot up a school" while purchasing the firearm he used to do just that.
Jacob Stellmach / Ass Napkins / aeidiot / Paperclip
(Pictured: Stellmach, from his ED article)
Stellmach was the fourth owner of Encyclopedia Dramatica after Rockenhaus went to jail. He had first tried to participate in the site under the username Paperclip in 2017 at the age of 17 and was banned for being a sperg. He returned in 2020 under the aeidiot name and somehow seized control of the site despite never having written an article or being integrated into the community in any meaningful way, giving him some kinship with Zaiger.
And just like Zaiger, he proceeded to run the site into the ground, unable to keep it up for more than a single day without some kind of weird fuckup bringing it down. He would personally blame the admins for his inability to manage the site at all.
Stellmach had also entered into a romantic relationship with adezero, Zaiger's ex-girlfriend. She was around 40 years old when he was 20. At some indeterminate point in time after he acquired the site, Stellmach and adezero had a nasty break-up that resulted in him banning her from the forum and wiki.
Stellmach then went to Kiwi Farms to make a thread on adezero (a), wherein he insulted her and threatened to post revenge pornography of her in retaliation for leaking his plans to trademark ED so that he could go after "coup wikis":
He had also registered ED as an LLC and was calling himself the CEO of ED.
In retaliation for his retaliation, adezero revealed that Stellmach had a leaky asshole due to being raped as a child and allegedly continuing to take it up the ass years down the line. As proof, she posted pictures of shit napkins that he would leave around the house and force her to pick up:
Stellmach, having the opportunity to disavow this as a deranged framejob by a spiteful ex, decided to confirm that this was legitimate because he's retarded:
According to adezero, after being raped as a kid he continued to take it up the ass, telling null that Stellmach's ass is "a goatse situation." This earned him the nickname "Ass Napkins." In retaliation for the retaliation to his retaliation, he posted some middlingly tasteful nudes of adezero. KF and ED users generally agree that Stellmach lost this one.
He also tried to revive EDF and used PHPBB instead of Xenforo, which caused his forum to be so chock full of spambots that it was totally unusable.
Some Closing Opinions and Thoughts
Encyclopedia Dramatica has been essentially dead for a long time. The site is still up, but account creation is disabled and users must personally ask in the Discord or on the forum for an account. The site's signature brand of SomethingAwful-style ironic detachment from everything has earned it a community that exists solely as a black hole of toxicity and faggotry. Anyone who is actually in a position of power on ED is generally apathetic to the site's health, and seems to find its degradation amusing. After all, caring about things is for faggots, trannies, and niggers, right?
The outlook of their site is not good and it's anyone's guess as to how many more drug-abusing admins they will churn through before they finally call it quits. It's safe to say that the Internet Made Them Stupid.
Sherrod won btw.
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