From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Warning: Some links and content may be offensive to some readers
A shock site is a website intended to be offensive to most viewers. Usually it displays a particular picture most prominently; some shock sites also show animations or galleries of images. Shock sites are often of varying severity; this article discusses the contents of notorious shock sites.
Links to shock sites are often passed around via email or disguised in posts to Slashdot and other discussion sites as a hoax in an attempt to trick readers into following the link to the website. In order to end these practices, Slashdot has changed the software to display the domain name of a linked URL in brackets following the link (example: "Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]"), so that any link to goatse.cx or a similar shock site would be immediately visible as such. To circumvent the measure, people began to set up mirror sites and use public CGI redirect scripts run by sites such as Yahoo or Slashdot itself.
The images of notorious shock sites have also occasionally been used for vandalism on Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia has disabled the ability to embed images on external servers by merely typing their URL, in part because of these acts of vandalism. It is now required to upload such images to the Wikipedia server first, which can only be done by registered users.
"Goatse" and "tubgirl" along with "the harlequin fetus" have become known as the LUE Trinity on the message boards at GameFAQs.com after they gained infamy there. Tubgirl and Goatse are both autoflagged words at the site now because of this, and providing links to any of the sites is considered a major offense.
The identity of the man is largely unknown, though according to some sources he is an Italian man who has been practicing anal expansion/anal stretching for years, as a hobby. The picture belongs to a series featuring the man demonstrating his anal stretching ability. Some have claimed that he is actually a hermaphrodite, and he is actually pulling open his vagina. The developer of this theory later admitted that the theory was false.
While his real name is unknown, he has been nicknamed "Bob Goatse" and "The Goatse Man". Another name attributed to the Receiver is "Yam Sthruss," originating from an email in the Feedback section from a person with this name claiming that hello.jpg is of him and asking for its removal. Most recently it has been claimed that the Goatse man is a man named Kirk Johnson, a well known practitioner of anal expansion.
According to webarchive, hello.jpg was given the caption "stinger". From June to July 2000, the site was replaced for that period with the text "What are you doing here?". The title at the time was "ten seconds down".
After complaints to NIC.CX (the regulation authority of .cx domains), the site goatse.cx was taken down Friday, January 16, 2004. (Goat.cx and Hick.org/Goat remain active.) See http://www.nic.cx/complaints/goatse.cx/goatse.cx11.01.2004.pdf for the official complaint by an individual named Rhonda Clarke, http://www.nic.cx/complaints/goatse.cx/aup.noticeofcomplaint.pdf for the official note to the domain's registrant and http://www.netdns.cx/DOMAIN_whois.cfm?domain2=goatse&submit=Whois for the current state of the goatse.cx whois entry.
A petition has even been launched to bring goatse.cx back: http://www.petitiononline.com/Goatse/petition.html.Distribution of links to shock sites
Goatse.cx
Goatse.cx is a widely-known shock site, with internet trolls heavily promoting (or secretly linking to) the site. The domain name of this site is a wordplay on the phrase "goat sex". Its front page contains an explicit picture (with filename hello.jpg) of a man manually opening his anus and rectum to approximately three times the normal size of such an orifice. His right hand has a gold ring on it.
For Halloween 2003, the picture was changed to an image of the picture carved into a pumpkin. (See http://linux.is.analdeluxe.de/ for a copy of that pumpkin picture.) The other sections (and the mirror sites) weren't altered.
The website has at least five alternative locations - hick.org/goat/, retropay.com/goatse/goatse.cx/, web.archive.org/web/20030623201150/http://goatse.cx/, and synflood.at/mirrors/goatse.cx/, which have the same contents as Goatse.cx, and goat.cx, which is apparently an older version of Goatse.cx. Both mirror sites are still up. This website is another mirror location.
Goatse.cx has four sections, three of which have images of questionable taste:
- The "Receiver" section, showing the picture (hello.jpg) described above of the man stretching his anus. Before the picture is the text in black, "The goatse.cx lawyer has informed us that we need a warning! So.. if you are under the age of 18 or find this photograph offensive, please don't look at it. Thank you!" It also has links to http://www.dolphinsex.org/ and http://www.urinalpoop.org/. It once had a link to http://www.biganal.com. The title of this page is "Eh".
- The "Giver" section, showing a picture (giver.jpg) of a man on a boat, which has been artificially altered (with XV according to the XCREATOR tag within the JPEG itself) to appear that he has an oversized penis. title of this page is "Whoa".
- The "Feedback" section, where e-mails are exhibited.
- The "Contrib" section showcasing visitor contributions to the site. Contrib has additional variations of hello.jpg and giver.jpg, as well as other images and files. The title of this page is "Contributed Work". Warning: The page begins with an ASCII version of hello.jpg.
- bush.jpg is a picture of United States President George W. Bush in his office with hello.jpg displayed on a laptop computer on his desk.
- collage-holyzoo.jpg is a collage of faces of different people affiliated with holyzoo.com and thinkattack.com, and a closeup on the gaping anus of the man in hello.jpg. The image contains the text "Special Thanks for being there for a laugh. From your friends at http://holyzoo.com and... http://THINKATTACK.com"
- goatse-wwii.jpg is a picture of a large snowball, with "goatse.cx" written on the side, chasing Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Hideki Tojo.
- giver2.jpg is a picture of the Goatse giver holding his oversized penis.
- magiceye.jpg is a Magic Eye picture. After about 16 seconds, the image changes to that of a 256 color version of hello.jpg. It attempts to fool viewers by exploiting the fact that, although the server sends a MIME type stating the filename is a JPEG image, the image is in fact an animated GIF.
- warning.jpg is a warning sign picture telling people not to go to goatse.cx
- goatsex.swf is a Flash Movie, set to the hook from "MMMBop" by Hanson. The movie shows a hand being stuck into he anus of a man performing another hello.jpg-like pose.
- Goatman.mp3 is an mp3 Music file. It takes up 518 KB.
- Foxy_goatse.mp3 is another mp3 music file, a parody of the Jimi Hendrix song Foxy Lady. It takes up 1061 KB.
- goatsecx-winamp.zip is a ZIP file containing a Winamp skin. It takes up 313 KB.
Goatse.cx once an IRC server located at irc.goatse.cx, which showed the ASCII hello.jpg in the MOTD. The server is part of the IRC network Evolnet.
For a period in February 2004, the website Goat.cx displayed the message "This site has been shutdown temporarily due to a spam that references it. The spam was not sent out by the sites owner but the site is being shut down in order to help prevent profit from the spam." Directly linking to hello.jpg showed a red picture of a red background with the text in black, "This site is temporairly down". Below it was text in blue that read, "Do not click any links".
Geographic location
The site uses the .cx country code top-level domain of Christmas Island, where the operators will not disclose the registrant's personal information. The actual server of Goatse.cx is not located on Christmas Island, but in the United States and is owned by Hick.org, which is a website about computer programming. The Hick.org domain was registered by Matt Miller in Overland Park, Kansas. Both Goatse.cx and Hick.org originate from the same IP address; the server is located in the Kansas City, Missouri metro-region. Goat.cx, a mirror of Goatse.cx, is located in the Houston, Texas metro-region.
External links
has a goatse tribute section.
References to Goatse.cx have become a ubiquitous in-joke in some Internet communities, many of which have created parodies of or tributes to hello.jpg and the other images on the site:
Tubgirl.com is a redirect to a picture (tubgirl.jpg) of a naked woman contorted in a bathtub, buttocks and anus upward, projecting a high fountain of liquid feces from her anus into her masked upward face at the bottom of the tub, between her legs.
Tubgirl.com is owned by Redcoat.net, a picture website. The Redcoat.net domain was registered by "absolute redcoat" in Knoxville, Tennessee. The Redcoat.net server is located in Parsippany-Troy Hills Township, New Jersey.
Before the launch of tubgirl.com, the relevant image was featured in a rotten.com story "Fecal Japan" explaining that the subject matter is allegedly popular in Japan. The copy of the image displayed on tubgirl.com, however, originated from http://www.consumptionjunction.com
The many sites that have pictures of the harlequin fetus syndrome aren't intended to be shock sites. Many internet trolls link to such pictures anyway to shock people.
The "Jebus Loves You" section is often used as a shock site.
The words "Ebony loving?" are seen before the images.
1.jpg shows a picture of a man excreting diarrhea feces.
2.jpg shows the feces being extracted by a syringe.
3.jpg shows a man injecting the feces into his penis. The fourth, 4.jpg shows the syringe empty. 5.jpg shows the man masturbating the feces out of his penis. 6.jpg shows a naked fat woman.
Bakla.net has six images. The first three images (ann12.jpg, ann17.jpg, ann18.jpg) are of a woman in a white dress against a black background. The next two images (China2.jpg, China1.jpg) are of a transgendered woman wearing a black T-shirt and blue jeans. The final image (China3.jpg) is of the woman naked, sitting on a bed, revealing her penis and breasts. Note that "Bakla" is a tagalog (Filipino) derogatory term for homosexual, basically equivalent to "queer" in English. The person shown on the page is from the Philippines.
Bakla.net is hosted on Yahoo servers, which are located in Sunnyvale, California
The page immediately shown when taken to the site has a picture of a woman with feces on her face. Goatse's hello.jpg is set as the page's background picture.
The Pain Series is a collection of seven JPEGs, each containing a number of shocking images pasted together. It was created by Huge_Midget of the Something Awful forums, whose users commonly use it as a prank, or when someone leeches (directly shows an image without linking to the site, or asking the webmaster's permission) pictures from their websites.
Shock sites chosen by random are:
Parodies
Tubgirl.com
External links
Harlequin Fetus
External link
Lemonparty.org
Lemonparty.org contains a picture (lemonparty.jpg) of a triumvirate of elderly men lying on a bed naked, one of whom is performing oral sex on another of the men, and the third kissing the fellatee. The site was defunct for a number of years, but has recently been restored. The site is hosted by http://www.evilpope.com
Originally, the text, omfg crazy! Click here to wash your eyeballs! lemonparty was under the picture. The site featured a link (labeled "Click here to wash your eyeballs") to a picture of a kitten.
External links
Adorable Bunnies
Adorable bunnies is a another collection of shock images.External links
Bakla.net
External links
Last Measure
Last Measure is a malicious shock site combining many of the shock sites listed above, including Tubgirl, Penisbird, Goatse, Lemonparty, and various other scatological pictures. It abuses Javascript to make it very hard to leave the website once you visit it. The main page plays a voice shouting "HEY EVERYBODY. I'M LOOKING AT GAY PORNO" at top volume, while the various shock images move around in popup windows, bouncing off the sides of the screen.External link
Albino Black Sheep - You are An Idiot Flash
When one is brought to the page, a Macromedia Flash movie called you.swf is seen, which chants "You are an idiot, hahahahahahahahahahaha" over and over again. When the user closes the browser window, the page abuses Javascript so that a flurry of popups with the flash are made.External link
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/you.html You should not visit it in a Javascript-enabled Web browser. If you do open this website, hold down the Alt+F4 keys in Microsoft Windows (and users running in the GNOME desktop environment), hit Command-Q in Mac OS or figure out how to use another similar key combination to close your browser. Some browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, will block these pop-ups.The Pain Series
The caption "Roofle. Owned. Scrub." is in the picture.
The picture has the captions "Mmm" for the Coprophagia picture.
It also has the caption "I hope you like this picture as much as I do."External links
Wilwheaton.org
This domain actually takes people that are intending to go to Wil Wheaton's weblog (Wil Wheaton Dot Net) to either the real site, or to a shock site on random. It can also bring up Google or the 404 error page on random. The "game" the domain plays is similar to that of Russian Roulette.
Wil Wheaton's weblog is actually located at http://www.wilwheaton.net/.
External link
http://www.wilwheaton.orgOgrish
Ogrish is an enormous, comprehensive site filled with disturbing images of gore, autopsies, amputations, and snuff movies. Ogrish's infamy peaked when photos of World Trade Center "jumper" victims emerged on the site, along with photographs of other 9/11 victims, shortly after the terrorist attacks. New content is posted daily, often photos of newsworthy calamities, such as suicide bombings, train wrecks, and graphic footage from the war in Iraq.External Link
http://www.ogrish.comRate My Goatse
Ratemygoatse.cx is a rate me site of goatse related material in the style of the hot or not site. This site contains several grotesque images of people attempting different styles of 'goatses'.Rate My Poo
Ratemypoo.com is another "rateme" parody that features submitted pictures of fecal matter. It is hosted by rotten.com.

