People from my Internet generation, those who came online in the mid-1990s, have rose-tinted memories of early Web "shock sites"—sites with unassuming URLs containing horrible pictures of awful things. As the moniker implies, stumbling onto one (or being tricked into viewing one by friends) usually resulted in a dropped jaw and maybe an overwhelming wave of revulsion, followed almost immediately by the urge to show it to someone else to watch their reaction. The great grandaddy of all shock sites is the infamous goatse.cx, which featured an unspeakably awful image which I admit setting as the wallpaper on friends' computers to more than once (BJ, if you're reading, I'm sorry, but it was hilarious every time).
The shock site has been offline for a number of years now, primarily due to a dispute with the Christmas Island Internet Administration over misuse of the .cx TLD country code, but recently the goatse.cx URL began displaying something a lot more pleasant than the original picture.
Goatse goes webmail
Ars spoke with the webmaster behind the reborn goatse.cx site, whom we'll call "Bob." Bob has asked, understandably, that we not use his name in this story—although the webmail service won't have anything to do with the shock content of the original site, the personal and professional implications of having one's name associated with "goatse.cx" could be significant.
"I bought the Goatse domain from Sedo.com," Bob told Ars when asked how he came to possess the name. It was a late-night purchase, and the desire to own the site stemmed from repeated exposure to it years earlier in university computer labs. The cost of picking up the domain from reseller Sedo.com? €8,000. "I bought it because it is a unique piece of Internet history and I had plans to develop it into something (I wasn't sure what at the time). I did regret the purchase shortly after but I figured that I could have just as easily lost the money on the stock market that year, so I just thought of it as a purchase of a piece of fine art, like a painting or a sculpture."
But what to do with a piece of fine art? A painting or sculpture might appreciate in value and give joy to the beholder, but "joy" isn't really something that one associates with shock sites. Bob hit up the SomethingAwful.com forums, asking for suggestions, and the idea that received the most support was to start a webmail service featuring "@goatse.cx" addresses.
A simpler time
Bob's words are almost wistful when I asked him for more details. "Goatse is a piece of the Internet generation's cultural legacy," he commented; it's an interesting assertion, but I have to agree—being repulsed by awful things you find online is a rite of passage, and Goatse.cx certainly filled that niche when I was first transitioning from BBSes to the big bad Internet. There's also a heavy element of nostalgia wrapped up in the site, which Bob paints as a sort of zeitgeist—goatse.cx in its original form was a raw bit of naked creativity, untempered by corporate intent and innocent of most government interference. "This was in my view the Golden Age of the Internet," he said. "There was a lot of unique and useful content (lots of garbage as well), websites weren't always just built to monetize idiots, and most governments didn't understand the Internet well enough to exploit users."
Along those lines, Bob is handling the revival of goatse.cx himself. "I am an individual," he said. "There are no partners or backers."
Grandmother-friendly e-mail
Bob says that he will charge users to have an "@goatse.cx" address, but that the cost will be small—less than $5 a year. There will also be no advertising. "The basic plan here is to offer people @goatse.cx e-mail addresses with a level of service consistent with the market leader (gmail.com). I also wanted to do this at a very low price with no advertising," he said. There won't be any trace of the original shock site's image anywhere in the new service, either. "Yes, this is an e-mail address your grandmother can use," he said.
It's a fact that any new webmail service is going to face adoption issues these days, since most folks have their digital identity pretty well established. Just about everyone has their own long tail of e-mail stretching back years, serving as an archive of past conversations and pictures, as well as an easily searchable form of reference ("What's my aunt's address again? My mom e-mailed me that a couple of years ago, so let me just do a quick search..."). Bob recognizes this, figuring that the novelty of the @goatse.cx address will attract users, but the "send-as" functionality built into Gmail and Hotmail and other more established e-mail services will keep them coming back. "This allowed me the option of offering people e-mail forwarding of an @goatse.cx alias to the e-mail address of their choice," he said.
He envisions people using @goatse.cx e-mail as an add-on e-mail address to their existing digital identities. "Essentially, this will allow people to forward the e-mail to an e-mail host that offers 'send as' features, e.g., gmail.com, yahoo.com or outlook.com or hotmail.com, and they will then be able to both send and receive using their @goatse.cx address from their favourite e-mail host," he explained. "I am actually using gmail.com with 'send as' to send this message now."
The situation for desktop e-mail applications is similar, with users able to add their @goatse.cx e-mail address as an additional account. "The bottom line," notes Bob, "is that they will get @goatse.cx e-mail addresses that are usable in conjunction with their existing Web-based mail accounts."
Potential issues
Aside from the near-automatic hesitation brought on by seeing "goatse.cx"—actually typing in the URL and hitting "enter" requires overcoming some well-honed protective instincts—there might be some additional issues facing the Goatse.cx webmail service. The site is an obvious fixture in every block list and Web filter in existence, and so would-be users might have trouble accessing the site directly to check their e-mail at work. Still, Bob believes that this won't be much of a problem: "Ultimately, blocking of http traffic through corporate firewalls does not affect the service due to the fact that goatse will be accessed through third-party e-mail hosts offering 'send as' e-mail, [like] Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc."
Additionally, Google doesn't show the site in its search results, and hasn't for about four years. This could limit discoverability, though the site's infamy will help bring in the curious. Still, Bob continues to try to have the site added back to Google's search index. "I have submitted a lot of applications to have it relisted," he said, "but I get a message from Google saying, 'Reconsideration request for http://goatse.cx/: No manual spam actions found'. This is extremely frustrating—[they] list mirrors containing the adult content, but they won’t list my G-rated site [and] yet claim there are no issues."
As far as the actual e-mail going to and from the domain is concerned, things seem to be in the clear. "The domain is not blocked by any spam-blocking software that I am aware of—you can search the domain on uribl.com and verify this," he said. "I have not encountered any of these issues during testing."
Signing up
The goatse.cx webmail service should be launching within the next couple of weeks, and the site is currently collecting e-mail addresses to be used to notify prospective goatse.cx users when the site goes live. About 12,000 people have signed up for the waiting list, so desirable e-mail aliases will likely go quickly. That there will be significant interest at launch is a foregone conclusion; if nothing else, the name guarantees it. Whether or not the service will have legs, though, is another story. The novelty of an "@goatse.cx" address is unquestioned, but its utility is a bit harder to quantify.
There's certainly tremendous cachet in the domain name among older Internet users, but the thought of having an "@goatse.cx" e-mail address might be more compelling than the reality. Aside from the occasional jokey e-mail to friends, I can't imagine an instance when I'd actually use it.
Still, Bob thinks the work is worth doing. "I think its important we hold on to some of the defining icons of that period, to remind ourselves of what the Internet could have been," he continues. "Goatse is one of those icons."
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