I have an almost, but not quite, completely unrelated anecdote about this.
I got on the internet in the early 2000s as a teenager, and would often be in various online chatrooms. Tricking people into visiting "shock sites" (most famously goatse.cx) seemed to be a common habit of certain denizens of these communities, either to people they didn't like or just because they thought it was funny.
Somehow I managed to avoid ever falling victim to this, but there was one exception I recall, in which I was linked to a website purporting to be website of the "Apostrophe Protection Society". After only a moment some kind of JavaScript kicked in to instead change the contents of the page to some goatse.cx-style shock image which I don't recall. In other words,
the "Apostrophe Protection Society" page just existed as a kind of bait-and-switch cover.
I quickly closed the page, and ironically what I ended up remembering is not anything about the shock image but the notion of the "Apostrophe Protection Society". I think at the time I assumed that the notion of the "Apostrophe Protection Society" was intended to be part of the joke - that nobody would ever actually make such an organisation.
I never bumped into that site again, but for heaven knows why (my memory is scary sometimes) I still remember the existence of this site pretending to be about an "Apostrophe Protection Society" (or some similar title).
So, TIL it actually is real - and actually a legitimate organisation. Presumably whoever made the above website must have picked the website at random and copied its contents. Well, I hope this random anecdote about what the web used to be like is of interest to someone...
No! speaking of lost punctuation marks, even more humorously goatse.cx
it's pronounced "goatsex". get it? get the leet joke? the joke doesn't work if you misinterpret the semantic versioning "point" as a full stop. full stop.
First sentence from Wikipedia: "goatse.cx, often spelled without the .cx top-level domain as Goatse, was an internet domain that originally housed an Internet shock site."
I got on the internet in the early 2000s as a teenager, and would often be in various online chatrooms. Tricking people into visiting "shock sites" (most famously goatse.cx) seemed to be a common habit of certain denizens of these communities, either to people they didn't like or just because they thought it was funny.
Somehow I managed to avoid ever falling victim to this, but there was one exception I recall, in which I was linked to a website purporting to be website of the "Apostrophe Protection Society". After only a moment some kind of JavaScript kicked in to instead change the contents of the page to some goatse.cx-style shock image which I don't recall. In other words, the "Apostrophe Protection Society" page just existed as a kind of bait-and-switch cover.
I quickly closed the page, and ironically what I ended up remembering is not anything about the shock image but the notion of the "Apostrophe Protection Society". I think at the time I assumed that the notion of the "Apostrophe Protection Society" was intended to be part of the joke - that nobody would ever actually make such an organisation.
I never bumped into that site again, but for heaven knows why (my memory is scary sometimes) I still remember the existence of this site pretending to be about an "Apostrophe Protection Society" (or some similar title).
So, TIL it actually is real - and actually a legitimate organisation. Presumably whoever made the above website must have picked the website at random and copied its contents. Well, I hope this random anecdote about what the web used to be like is of interest to someone...