Shock site
A Shock site is a website that is intended to be offensive or shocking to its viewers, containing shocking material which is considered distasteful and crude, and is generally of a pornographic, scatological, or extremely violent nature. In most cases, a shock site displays a single picture, some shock sites also show animations or galleries of images, Links to shock sites are often passed around via email or disguised in posts to discussion sites as a hoax in an attempt to trick readers into following the link to the website .
The news and discussion site Slashdot has changed its software (Slash) to display the domain name of a linked URL in brackets following the link (example: "Click Here [wikipedia.org]"), so that any link to goatse.cx or a similar shock site would be immediately visible as such. The change has been effective in reducing the number of links to shock sites even though trolls began to set up mirror sites and use public CGI redirect scripts run by sites such as Yahoo! in an attempt to circumvent the measure.
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Examples of shock sites
Goatse.cx
- Main article: Goatse.cx
Goatse.cx, <ref>"The Hands of God", snopes.com.</ref> one of the best-known shock sites that exists, features an image, hello.jpg, of a man stretching his anus with his hands. This same image was formerly called the "shock3r" , and has been featured on various hacked sites. The link to these sites was primarily spread through IRC.
The original domain goatse.cx was pointed to www.blackraven.cx (masked in an HTML frame) by the NIC .cx authority in January 2004<ref>"COCCA NIC suspension page"</ref><ref>"Goatse.cx pointed to blackraven.cx"</ref>, but several mirrors sites are currently up and running hosting the original content<ref>Archive.org's archived copy of the pages accessible through the domain goatse.cx before it was pointed to http://www.blackraven.cx/</ref> (including goatse.ch, goatse.fr, as well as goatse.cz which also manages to preserve some of the original phonetic appeal).
Hai2U.com
Hai2U.com features an image of a woman vomiting while performing fellatio on a man sitting in a lawn chair, taken from a photo shoot by Max Hardcore. The actress uses the stage name Catalina and is featured in several of Hardcore's films. The site has the text "HAI2U!!!1 :)" in bold at the top of the page. The page contains a link visible only in the Internet Explorer browser to make it your homepage. It was at one point highly ranked on a Google image search for "blowjob". HAI2U asks users to comment on the website, and provides a form for them to submit comments.
Lastmeasure
Lastmeasure is a shock site that plays a recording of a voice shouting, "Hey everybody, I'm Looking at gay porno," using the Adobe Flash plugin, while various famous shock site images move around in constantly-spawned popup windows. The voice in previous Last Measure versions was in the file fsckyou.wav.mp3. The defining feature of Lastmeasure is that each page spawns popups, which themselves spawn more in a cycle limited only by available system resources such as memory. Lastmeasure is the web browser equivalent of a Forkbomb and is commonly referred to as the "browser bomb". This functionality was originally provided by javascript, but is now primarily through Flash. This changeover occurred in the transition from LM version 3.41 to LM version 4. LMv4.1 was the first public release of this technology.
Lemonparty.org
Lemonparty.org contains a picture, lemonparty.jpg, of three elderly men participating in group sex. The site was defunct for a number of years, then restored.<ref name="lemonparty_archive">Lemonparty site info at archive.org.</ref> It once had a link that stated "click here to wash your eyeballs", which led to a picture of a kitten . In addition, the background has turned gray and there are links below leading to the "Official lemonparty chatroom" and "Brad.com", another shock site . The site often goes offline for short periods of time.
Tubgirl.com
Tubgirl.com was a redirect to a picture, tubgirl.jpg, containing a masked, naked woman lying in a bathtub, buttocks raised with her legs over her head, projecting a fountain of orange/yellow liquid from her anus onto her face. Before the launch of tubgirl.com, this image was featured in a rotten.com story "Fecal Japan"<ref name=fecaljapan>http://web.archive.org/web/20021004051657/vatican.rotten.com/fecaljapan/</ref> claiming that the subject matter is allegedly popular in Japan. The image displayed on tubgirl.com is marked as having been previously posted on Consumption Junction. The url address www.tubgirl.com now redirects to Consumption Junction, and displays the image with a "rate me" box, where viewers can rate the image from 1 to 10.<ref name="lastmeasure" />
Other shock sites
Penis Bird contains an image of a Scarlet Macaw perched on a man's erect penis. The page contains a note from a Slashdot reader asking that the image be relocated (if not removed) because Slashdot trolls are using hyperlinks to send unsuspecting users there.<ref>Letter from Slashdot.org, (along with picture).</ref> The page also mentions a crude ASCII art version of Penis Bird, which appears from time to time on Slashdot.
Former shock sites
- Pain Series was a series of seven collages combining many individual images such as Goatse and Lemonparty together with other shock images, some of them real, others drawn. The site is now nonexistent.
- Rustina.org contains a falsified picture of Rusty Foster's wife having sex with another man, as well as a fictional account of the story behind the picture. It is the picture that caused Rusty to temporarily shut down new user sign ups on his website.<ref>Rusty announces closure of new user sign ups on Kuro5hin due to offensive picture</ref> The site was taken down as of December 2, 2006.
- ShrewsburyCollege.co.uk was a site containing a photograph of two men, one being anally penetrated by the other with what appeared to be a bicycle pump. In addition to that, both were covered in feces. The name of the site was taken from the Shrewsbury College of Arts & Technology, which used to be known by the acronym SCAT. The website has now been replaced by the actual Shrewsbury College website. This shock site was perhaps the only one to have appeared in a print newspaper, featuring in a front-page article of the Shrewsbury Chronicle on 8 December 2005. In the aforementioned article, the MP for Shrewsbury & Atcham, Daniel Kawczynski, mentioned that the site was brought to his attention by a fellow Member of Parliament. The visitor logs of what are presumably the reporter that wrote the story, and Kawczynski are available to view online. <ref>A visitor from the Midland News Association, which publishes the newspaper</ref> <ref>A visitor from the Houses of Parliament</ref>
