Some admin here relaying the story of Goatse
A little more detail for the newcomers:
After the Sep. 11th attacks on the WTC, Rayn noticed in a movie that there was a weird looking trick of light & dust that basically looked like a devil's face. He of course posted a screenshot of the movie (directly from CNN's website mind you) with the devil face, which included a zoomed in version and the caption "What the fuck is this?"
Well apparently people sent around links of it to friends via email because the picture itself got a lot of hits, and eventually it found its way to an editor for Cnet, who wrote an article which among other things labeled us "fear merchants", and condemned us for photoshopping this "obviously fake" image, which was in fact quite real. He also directly linked to the image off our server (instead of making a local copy on the cnet site.) Well the hate mail rolled in. Lots of people who believed this guy spammed our email addresses telling us what awful, bad, mean, cruel, evil people we where - and how we were going to burn in hell. This was also killing our server because of all the traffic to the one image. Even removing the image wouldnt have helped because of all the "404 - File not found" pages that would be generated.
So we all emailed the guy that wrote the article and explained to him that the picture was in fact real (and we mentioned that any 'reporter' worth his salt would have checked it out before slandering us,) and sent him a direct link to the movie. We also requested that he either take the article down or remove the part about us. In addition we explained that directly linking to the images was not only breaking our server, but costing our sponsors an enormous amount of money.
Instead, he syndicated the article. It went to CNN, Yahoo news, MSNBC, and basically every major news site on the internet. The now enormous amount of traffic to the site/image was litterally killing the server. We emailed all of them begging them to if nothing else delete the link, as it was wrecking our server. We got no replies.
So, Rayn being very swift of thought decided to take some action. Keeping in mind that the image was linked directly to our server, Rayn replaced the image - and we wrote down how much traffic the image had gotten to that point. The image Rayn chose to replace the devil picture with was the goatse . cx man (the guy holding his asshole open wide enough to park a truck in it.) Rayn then informed the people on the forum what he'd done, and they collectively fell out of their chairs laughing. A few pissed themselves.
After a few hours of almost constant laughing, the sites removed the part of the article about our site. We checked the traffic stats on the image. 300,000 people viewed it thinking it was a harmless image linked from their favourite news site - and those same 300,000 people got an eyefull of some guys spleen.
It's widely considered to be what insured our site's place in the books of infamy.
