Shock site

A shock site is a website intended to be offensive to most viewers, usually containing frightening and/or incredibly distasteful and crude content. In most cases, it displays a particular picture most prominently; some shock sites also show animations or galleries of images, particularly shock images. Shock sites are often of varying severity; for descriptions of shock sites, see list of shock sites.

Links to shock sites are often passed around via email or disguised in posts to discussion sites as a hoax in an attempt to trick readers into following the link to the website. Discussion site Slashdot has changed their software (Slash) to display the domain name of a linked URL in brackets following the link (example: "Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]"), so that any link to goatse.cx or a similar shock site would be immediately visible as such. The change has been effective in reducing the number of links to shock sites even though people began to set up mirror sites and use public CGI redirect scripts run by sites such as Yahoo! or Slashdot itself in an attempt to circumvent the measure.

In recent times many trolls, instead of linking to shock sites (which can lead to disciplinary consequences, such as banishment from the board in which the link was posted), prefer a tradition known as the anti-shock tradition, where trolls link to traditionally non-offensive material, disguised as shocking or pornographic material. The anti-shock site oralse.cx (which features images of a kitten and dachshund), a parody of Goatse.cx, is among the most well-known examples of this. More recent cases of the anti-shock phenomenon involve links to images of family pets and to mary-kateandashley.com, the web site of The Olsen twins.

See also