J’raxis Confesses to Being the WIPO Troll

And for anyone who doesn’t know who this is, a brief history. Most of WIPO’s exploits have been lost to history since Slashdot used to delete −1 comments when they archived stories, but I’ve assembled as much as possible below.

The WIPO Troll first made his appearance at Slashdot in October or November, 2000. His first account was simply “WIPO,” named after the World Intellectual Property Organization, an organization notorious around Slashdot. With this account, the WIPO Troll posted completely nonsensical gibberish all over Slashdot, more or less earning himself a reputation of being a complete ass. After discovering goatse.cx and sites such as this, WIPO soon registered otherSlashdotaccounts and branched out to other weblogs, starting with Slashduh.

Slashduh ran a badly-designed weblog using PHP-Nuke, and got sprayed with goatse.cx and fecaljapan imagery numerous times. WIPO soon discovered a multitude of other weblogs running the same or similarly insecure software, and quickly became infamous for goatse.cx-ing sites far and wide. Among the victims were MsGeek, MacSlash, Fark.com, a now-defunct site called the Love Test Club (abandoned due to the influx of fellow crapflooders) and another dead blog called LetsRiot.

In January, 2001, someone calling himself the “Network Vigilante” claimed that the WIPO Troll was, in fact, me, and he had a fairly elaborate trail outlined on a now-dead site located at www.networkvigilantes.org. WIPO had made several “mistakes” during his crapflooding career, most notably not using HTTP proxies thereby exposing his relatively-static IP address to his victims, and linking to a nonexistent page at J’raxis·Org as his homepage in his Slashdot profile.

WIPO finally goatse.cxed his last weblog in March, 2001. After attacking MsGeek with a furious flood of Rotten.com imagery, the webmaster claimed to have complained to WIPO’s ISP to have his account cancelled. While absolutely nothing actually happened, WIPO decided to lay low for a while and spent some time spreading rumors of his own demise, anonymously or as a character known as “Free WIPO,” at Geekizoid and around Slashdot. The WIPO Troll, who had become notorious in the crapflooding community, completely disappeared. “Free WIPO” remained for a several months, as a website moving from one free hosting provider to the next, until it too finally disappeared.

WIPO burst back onto Slashdot in November as a completely different troll. WIPO concentrated all his crapflooding and trolling to Slashdot exclusively, writing several memorable crapfloods, most notably, the Taco-Snotting FAQ (a term which itself seems to have entered the troll lexicon alongside “First Post” and Natalie Portman jokes). WIPO spent most of his time spreading these few posts far and wide across Slashdot, then once again disappeared in January of 2002, claiming to have committed suicide.

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The URL of this document is http://www.jraxis.com/archive/slashdot/wipo-confession.

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Copyright © 2002 J’raxis 270145. Verbatim crapflooding of this document is permitted in any medium, provided this copyright notice is preserved, and next time you take a dump, you think of the WIPO Troll and all he’s done to make Slashdot a better place.