Goatse.cx

Goatse.cx was an infamous Internet shock site that became well-known among various Internet forums because of trolls who posted links in order to upset other forum readers. Its front page featured a picture, hello.jpg, of a naked man stretching his anus open to a diameter roughly equal to the width of his hand, with the inside of his rectum clearly visible. Visible below his anus were his scrotum and dangling, flaccid penis.

The site goes offline

As of January 14, 2004, the domain goatse.cx was taken offline. But many mirrors of the site are still available, and the image is displayed on many websites. The most common mirror was goat.cx; but this, like its predecessor, was taken offline as of February 22, 2005. As of February 27, the domain goat.cx, like goatse.cx, was suspended by the Christmas Island Internet Administration; but it appeared, as of April 2005, to be back online showing only the message "eat my goatse'd penis!" As of May 2005, there is an image on the site showing a pumpkin with some hands around it as if it is stretching its anus.

The goatse.cx domain name was reported sold at an Auction on 30 April 2007 to a currently unknown bidder. According to seobidding.com, the first auction ended with fake bids so the auction was reactivated.. This was again won by fake bidders, so Seobidding.com announced that the website would be sold for $500000 at that legal action would be pursued against the fake bidders.

Organization

Goatse.cx had four sections, two of which had images intended to shock the viewer:

• The "Receiver" page, titled "Eh", showing the aforementioned hello.jpg. Hello.jpg has the alt attribute "stinger". Before the picture is the text in black, "The goatse.cx lawyer has informed us that we need a warning! So.. if you are under the age of 18 or find this photograph offensive, please don't look at it. Thank you!" This text was not a sincere warning, as hello.jpg is very close to it. It also had links to http://www.dolphinsex.org/ and http://www.urinalpoop.org/, and it once had a link to http://www.biganal.com/ (all of which are now occupied by cybersquatters). The text below hello.jpg reads, "IMPORTANT NOTE: There are many merchandising attempts for goatse.cx around the web-- none of them are real, none of them are official. Do not buy this gimmick merchandise. The official goatse.cx merchandise is coming soon!"
• The "Giver" page, titled "Woah", shows a picture (giver.jpg) of a man reclining in an orange convertible (later versions show him on a yacht or speedboat of some kind, with ocean or river waves in the background). He has an oversized penis which reaches up to his chest. The length and girth of the mentioned penis is exaggeratedly anatomically disproportionate to the rest of the man's body; the photo shows obvious signs of being "photoshopped" or otherwise graphically altered for shock value or humor. The whole website contains an anal sex joke, that the receiver is stretching his anus so the giver can insert his oversized penis into him, and therefore, bring on sexual intercourse for the two men.
• The "Feedback" section, where e-mails are exhibited.
• The "Contrib" section showcasing visitor contributions to the site. Contrib has additional variations of hello.jpg and giver.jpg, as well as other images and files. The title of this page is "Contributed Work".
  • goatse-wwii.jpg is a picture of a large snowball, with "goatse.cx" written on the side, chasing Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Hideki Tojo.
  • giver2.jpg is a picture of the Goatse giver holding his oversized penis.
  • magiceye.jpg is a Magic Eye picture. The initial image, a legitimate autostereogram of a helix, changes after about 16 seconds to that of a lower resolution, 256 color version of hello.jpg. It attempts to fool viewers by exploiting the fact that, although the server sends a MIME type stating the filename is a JPEG image, the image is in fact an animated GIF.
  • warning.jpg is a warning sign picture telling people not to go to goatse.cx
  • goatsex.swf is a Flash Movie, set to the hook from "MMMBop" by Hanson. The movie shows a large dildo being inserted into the anus of the man posing in hello.jpg. The background is from another gap.zip picture, gap8.jpg.
  • Goatman.mp3 is an MP3 Music file. It takes up 518 KB.
  • Foxy_goatse.mp3 is another mp3 music file, a parody of the Jimi Hendrix song Foxy Lady. It takes up 1061 KB.
  • goatsecx-winamp.zip is a ZIP file containing a Winamp skin, depicting hello.jpg. It takes up 313 KB.
  • hello.mpg is a movie, first showing the text "HI" on a black background, followed by shots of gap.zip pictures. At the end of the movie, the following text appears next to a picture of a teenage boy:
    "http://www.goatse.cx
    The goatse.cx lawyer has informed us that we need a warning! So.. if you are under the age of 18 or find this photograph offensive, please don't look at it. Thank you!"

People sometimes link to goatse.cx images not shown on the actual webpages, such as loopback.jpg, a picture of a man looping his penis into his anus. There are also numerous other files in the directory http://www.goatse.cx/contrib/.

The image hello.jpg originates from a set of 40 images depicting the man performing various anal sexual acts. In those images, the man used dildos and butt plugs to stretch his anus. The images were located by Stile Project and are also available from the "Contrib" section of the goatse.cx website under the filename gap.zip. hello.jpg is the third file in the archive, gap3.jpg.

Goatse.cx also had a robots.txt file at one point .

Geographic location

The site used the .cx country code, the top-level domain of Christmas Island, whose operators will not disclose registrants' personal information. The actual server of Goatse.cx was not located on Christmas Island, but in the United States and is owned by Hick.org, a website about computer programming and bathroom humor. The Hick.org domain was registered by Matt Miller in Overland Park, Kansas. Both Goatse.cx and Hick.org originate from the same IP address; the server is located in the Kansas City, Missouri metro-region. Goat.cx, formerly a mirror of Goatse.cx, was located in the Dallas, Texas metro-region, while current mirror Goatse.cz seems to be located in Clifton, New Jersey.

Parodies, tributes, and trivia

Because many frequent Internet users have been tricked into viewing the site at one time or another, it has become something of an Internet meme. As such, hello.jpg and the other images on the site are common subjects of parodies and tributes.

• The man in hello.jpg was wearing a golden ring on his left hand.
• Unreal Tournament 2004 features an assault level called as_junkyard for which the final objective is to move the Hellbender through an object that bore similarity to the Goatse.cx anus.
• The online role-playing game Kingdom of Loathing features two tributes-
  • while fighting a Spam Witch - "She shows you a picture of her pet goat. 'This is my goat, see?' she says. Dear god, the horror."
  • In an adventure during The Daily Dungeon called "Seriously, I Just Read It For the Articles." If the adventurer does not have sleaze resistance, s/he buckles down and looks at a centerfold, only to have it be from the magazine "Secret World of Goatse."
• Alex Albrecht of Diggnation fame made a reference to Goatse.cx on episode 20 of Tiki Bar TV. The Tiki Bar crew were having Internet bandwidth issues, and Alex (playing the character "Son of the Internet"), said that their issues were affecting the whole Internet. - "Goatse's down, people are happy about that."
• The alt attribute on the image, "Stinger", actually comes from the EFnet #quake channel. The image itself was discovered on a webpage called members.xoom.com/stinger hosted by XOOM (now defunct). Goatse.cx was created by a #quake member expressly for the purpose of displaying the image. [1]
• Threadless created a t-shirt with the word "GOATSE" on the front, a clear reference to the website.
• A parody involving a iGoatse iPod skin
• The video game web comic VG Cats featured a comic referencing the goatse.cx picture, although the actual image was not shown.
• The recently updated WestNet internet providers logo (an Australian ISP) bears some resemblance to Goatse. [2]
• Following Hurricane Charley in August 2004, a photograph purporting to show "the hands of God" in the cloud formations in the aftermath of the disaster circulated via email. The image was eventually proven to be a photoshopped Goatse parody[3].