Encyclopedia Dramatica

» see encyclopediadramatica.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Encyclopedia Dramatica started in December 2004, the domain registered on the 8th, after LiveJournal banned a community called LJdrama that spent its time documenting other people's fights. Its members needed somewhere else to keep the record, and Sherrod DeGrippo, who went by Girlvinyl, gave them a wiki. It looked like Wikipedia on purpose and described itself as written in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary. The New York Times Magazine later called it a troll archive.

For most of the late 2000s it was where you went to find out what a 4chan joke meant, years before Know Your Meme existed. It was also cruel, often about real people, and the bills followed. In 2008 it said it had lost its advertisers, and in 2010 Australia's media regulator put it on a blacklist and Google Australia dropped it from search.

This was the English-language end of the internet. In those years my own forum life was Turkish, on donanimhaber and frmtr, which had plenty of drama of their own, but nobody there was writing it up as an encyclopedia.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ april 2011 ~

On 14 April 2011 anyone opening encyclopediadramatica.com was sent to Oh Internet, a new safe-for-work site about memes. "Shock for shock's sake is old at this point," DeGrippo said at the time. At ROFLCon that October she put it another way: "We were unable to stop the degradation of the content." She also said the site had never made money, since its content scared advertisers off. Oh Internet itself went offline in October 2013. Its domain now shows a default server test page, and encyclopediadramatica.com does not resolve at all.

Our reader's version of the shutdown adds legal pressure and takedown notices. I could not find DeGrippo saying that herself, though the advertisers and the Australian blacklist are on the record. Wikipedia identifies her with the Sherrod DeGrippo who later ran threat research at Proofpoint and now works on threat intelligence at Microsoft, which matches what our reader wrote.

~ the funerals after ~

The fans did not wait. By 16 April 2011 a copy rebuilt from Google's cache was running at encyclopediadramatica.ch. In March 2012 the .ch address was blocked because the site had no Swiss address, so it moved to .se. In September 2013 the .se registrar took the domain and the wiki was down for more than five days before coming back on .es, and when .es was hijacked in October 2014 it went back to .se. Between 2017 and 2019 it bounced between .se and .rs.

In January 2020 the wiki went dark again behind a holding page titled "NEW YEAR NEW ME" that said the forums had been nuked. It came back in February 2020 at .wiki from database backups, the community split that November and moved to .online, and in May 2024 .online was abandoned for a run of short-lived addresses. Since June 2024 it has lived at edramatica.com.

~ the old addresses ~

By my count the original died once, the wiki has gone fully offline about three more times, and it has changed address at least eight times, so our reader's "at least five" holds up. The old .se now serves casino spam, and the old .ch is a theatre blog.

credit to sheldonsnooper, who kept count of the deaths. thank you.

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