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YTMND

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YTMND (ytmnd.com) is a website community that allows users to create their own variations of the website featured at www.yourethemannowdog.com, and make comments about each other's creations. YTMND (or ytmnd) is also used to refer to the individual variations of that site. YTMND is also an acronym of the phrase "You're The Man Now Dog".

Origin

The yourethemannowdog.com website was created in 2001 by Max Goldberg. It consists of a repeated photo of actor Sean Connery and, in large zooming text, "YOURE (sic) THE / MAN NOW / DOG.COM". A recording of Connery saying "You're the man now, dog!" from the film Finding Forrester repeats continuously.

The site inspired others to create similar sites with other movie and television quotes. At first Goldberg maintained a list and mirror of these sites but the list started to get very large. In 2004, rather than continuing to maintain the list, Goldberg created ytmnd.com. His new site lets anyone become a member and create their own YTMND by uploading a sound file, uploading a graphic file and optionally entering text to display. Very quickly the site caught on in popularity and became an internet phenomenon when major weblogs began linking to the now infamous YTMND Captain Picard tribute which has received over 700,000 views as of May 2005 (see fads and memes).

Forums

The forums on the site were silly and sometimes obscene. The forum members were totally different from members of YTMND itself, often posting racist and bigoted imagery intended to shock. By October 1st, 2004, the forums, in Max Goldberg's own words, had become the next "STORMFRONT, a stomping ground for SS men in training."

On October 14th, 2004, Max Goldberg, without any warning, inexplicably shut down the forums and banned the chief users -- citing tension between himself and the website's host, but he has since reopened them. Many of the original forum members left for other forums during the downtime though (see external links).

Visitors from other forums

Since the site has gone up, many forums have begun to visit the main YTMND site as a group. One of the first and major ones is the GameFAQs forums, LUE in particular. They are responsible for most of the game related fads that get placed around the site, their most popular one is the Peppy Hare "Barrel Roll" fad (see fads and memes)). Some rebellious GameFAQs forum users have even used YTMND as a means of showing off their antics on their home forum. One of these incidents was when a user submitted a page showing the topic of a thread on GameFAQs tweaked around to show a picture of 3 cows holding signs which collectively said "All your base are belong to us", before the said user was banned. Another major forum whose influence is felt at YTMND is the official World of Warcraft forums. They are responsible for the popularity and origination of many fads and memes including the infamous Leeroy Jenkins fad.

Many YTMND users view the visitors from other forums as annoying and often they create YTMNDs to simply hurl insults at them. Some even accuse users of posting YTMNDs on other forums simply to boost it's popularity in order to get it featured on the front page of ytmnd.com as a popular site. Whether or not posting a link to a YTMND on another forum for these purposes is abusive or unfair and whether or not to filter "other forum" hits from YTMND pageview counts are topics that are often debated in the official YTMND forums. As of 2005 these, and other, "other forum" influences can still be felt at YTMND and they are likely to remain a source of controversy for as long as that continues.

Fads and memes

Here is a partial list of fads and memes, in no specific order (Note that only a few of them are Internet fads/memes that aren't limited to YTMND):

It is not uncommon that many of these memes are used in conjunction with others. (for example, Darth Vader dancing in front of Dschinghis Khan, before the entire scene is crushed by a Thwomp). Some of them also rely on having an element in the original YTMND getting replaced by another one, usually another fad (Most notably the PSP and Hasselhoff ones).

The 2004 un-moderated period

Before the modern day ytmnd, where submissions are for the MOST part moderated, a certain portion of the content that was on ytmnd was highly offensive. It's said it was to do with Goldberg's will for free speech on the site (which he explained on the forums at the time). Some of the offensive submissions included

  • A GIF loop showing a terrorist holding up the head of Nick Berg after his beheading, with the Outkast song "Heyyy ya" looping in the back (Perhaps the worst of the lot, provoking a huge thread on their forums to take it down, which eventually happened)
  • Loads of extreme Hentai
  • Various images of extremely fat people with loose skin having sex
  • The goatse man in place of promised images of nude celebrities
  • Amputated limbs (sometimes male gentials)
  • Autopsy pictures
  • Extremely racist sites, for example the "NIGGA PUNCH" image featuring an illustrated man punching a black person, and images of Auschwitz

These used to provoke huge and oftened spammed replies in the user comment box, sometimes causing the browser to crash due to the huge ammounts. After the downtime there is now a warning displayed that sites that are racist, illegal, excessively pornographic and unfunny will be deleted

The 2004-05 Winter Downtime

The site as a whole was temporarily closed in December 2004, with Goldberg forwarding the site to the original yourethemannowdog.com without notice. The site had previously suffered from broken scripts, causing all user-created sites to work intermittently. The scripting error itself was relatively simple: several forum members discovered that editing the HTML files by hand could allow the sites to be viewed and other members created tutorials, some ironically in the form of YTMND sites, on how to employ the fix. Despite all of this the scripting error went unchecked for several months and was still there when the site closed down. This led to rumors that Goldberg abandoned or even sabotaged the site, but in late March 2005 ytmnd.com was reopened with the scripting error fixed and all of the previous user created YTMNDs and comments intact.

Post 2004-05 Winter Downtime

  • The site is currently going under a cleanup, redesign, and sorting.
  • As of April 19th, 2005 the yourethemannowdog.com was updated to simply redirect to a YTMND on ytmnd.com.
  • On May 30th, 2005, YTMND went over a cosmetic makeover thus improving load times for the page, saving bandwidth, and just plain making the site look prettier.
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