Doomworld

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Doomworld in 2009, using the design implemented in early 2002

Doomworld is the oldest unofficial news website dedicated to the Doom games. The site was founded on March 13, 1998 by Andrew Stine (Linguica), Gaston Lahaut (Mordeth), and Javier Heredia (Dukrous); the site began as part of the AtomicGamer network of TeleFragged, LLC. It became an independent website following the shutdown of Atomic Gamer on July 25, 2015. Of the original founders, only Stine and Lahaut remain, but the amount of total members on the staff has grown almost three-fold.[1]

In addition to Doom related news, Doomworld also hosts the weekly /newstuff Chronicles reviews of new WADs uploaded to the idgames archive and a database of the archive with search, user comment, and mirror access capabilities. The site also provides informational resources about Doom and associated games, hosting of Doom websites, and a forum with over 10,000 registered users and 816,000 posts as of December 2009.

Doomworld received some mention in mainstream media in 1999 due to the controversy surrounding the Columbine High School Massacre and shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's obsession with the Doom games. It gained some additional renown in the same year after Andrew Stine convinced John Carmack to allow the site to redistribute the Doom source code under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Forums

Doomworld provides a set of forums. Discussion areas are provided for Classic Doom, Doom 3, and Doom (2016), as well as the “Everything Else” general discussion forum and areas for discussion of news and hosted sites. The forum software used is vBulletin.

Trivia

  • Instead of threads and posts being deleted, they are sent to "Post Hell". In contrast to the rest of the forums, Post Hell features a bright orange theme, flashing imitation banner ad, obnoxious background music, and an animated flame effect at the bottom of the window. Fredrik Johansson is featured at the top of Post Hell.
  • Troublemakers are generally not banned outright from the site, but instead temporarily “losered”. Losered people can only post in a single forum, “Losers”, which is invisible to normal users.
  • The pink fish first appeared on Doomworld. It is common for people to have fish as their avatars.
  • It is not possible for a normal user to set a custom title. Instead, titles are given out by administrators in randomly timed “title giveaways”, or set in response to behaviour on the forums.
  • The Doomworld forums inspired a series of joke WADs. An anonymous mapper created dwforums.wad as a parody of the forums. The mapper later followed up with dwforums2.wad and dwforums3.wad.

Notable articles and features

2015 hosting change

It was announced by Andrew Stine in early July of 2015 that AtomicGamer would close down by the end of the month and that plans were in place to backup and transfer all of the site's content to a new hosting arrangement in the hands of community members. As of July 25, the doomworld.com domain became intermittently unavailable due to a change made to AtomicGamer's DNS records. It was afterward fully re-established under Stine's control as an independent website. The site was temporarily available at an alternate doom.world domain name until transfer of the doomworld.com domain from Telefragged and sufficient DNS propagation were complete.

External links

Sources

  • This article incorporates text from the open-content Wikipedia online encyclopedia article Doomworld.