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Fark.com is a popular community website allowing users to comment on a daily batch of news articles and notable websites, which it classifies as "Stupid," "Interesting," "Obvious," "Strange," "Spiffy," "Boobies," and so on. Originally, the web server on Drew Curtis's fark.com domain contained no content, except for an image of a squirrel with large testicles. Later, in 1999, the site was changed into a popular weblog, as a way for Curtis to share what he considered interesting news postings with his friends rather than sending them numerous emails. This proved to be so popular that a web-based method of submitting links was added, to avoid receiving all of their numerous emails. Eventually, Drew decided Fark needed a talkative community built around its theme of off-the-wall humorous news links, and so the fark "Comments Thingee" was born, along with a system of Fark.com user accounts.Fark is a euphemism for fuck. Forms of the word include farking, farked, farker. Like many online communities, Fark.com has developed its own in-jokes known as "Farkisms" or "Fark clichés". For example, "Fb- is the father" is often added to any report involving birth or pregnancy. One of these in-jokes is a clever way of preventing " first post" messages: if a message contains the words "first post" its time stamp is changed twelve hours into the future (making it one of the later posts), and the words "First Post" are turned into "Boobies". However new users occasionally fall victim to this, and post a message that ends up saying something like: "This is my Boobies on Fark". The filter also censors out certain swear words. There are also other clichés in the news headlines that are submitted, a few examples are "find Sarah Connor" (from the Terminator movies) when submitting a technological news (Example: "New robot will explore the surface of mars, find Sarah Connor) or "Duke sucks" (the football team) when submitting a sports news.
Fark.com also features regular " Photoshop contests" where users use a graphical editing program (such as Adobe Photoshop, from which the contest draws its name) to create various funny pictures derived from an image provided by the creator of the contest, or less commonly according to a set theme as set out in written form. Clichés (really, in-jokes) are common in the resulting works; some of the most common recurring clichés include Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars yelling "Its a trap!", the killing of kittens, a disembodied black baby head, the aforementioned large-testicled squirrel, and Domokun the squarish muppet-looking thing from Japan (who also originated the kitten-killing cliché). Often in entries that are offensive or sacreligious (or, especially, entries involving the September 11th terrorist attacks) the submitter will kiddingly ask for a "one way ticket to hell, please". This is often abbreviated, so a poster with an obviously disrespectful topic may just say "one ticket, please" or even simply "aisle seat".
Fark.com's arch-rival is Somethingawful.com. The common practice in both communities of using Photoshop to alter photographs sparked a Something Awful vs. Fark Photoshop Battle, with Wil Wheaton as celebrity judge. The result of this battle was Fark's victory over Something Awful with an overall team score of 192 to 183. This result has been questioned by many of the Something Awful participants, as Wil Wheaton is known to be a frequenter of Fark. Some believe that Fark's victory was solely due to bias.
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