Facebook page for Squackle.com: http://www.facebook.com/squackle
If you would like to write for Squackle and its network of sites, please contact davepoobond@squackle.com.
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General Site History:
Squackle.com is a humor site, presented using WordPress. The original Squackle.com was a web site that was plagued with problems, biggest of all being bad presentation of content. It was started in 1999 by a group of friends, headed by davepoobond. It was meant to be a comedy web site full of content they had created, but soon came to encompass multiple types of humor. Eventually davepoobond took “full control” of the “editorial direction” of the web site and began to post mainly things he had created with no explicit purpose, such as the SBC scripts and funny prank chats.
After jumping from free hosting site to free hosting site as the content of the site grew, www.squackle.com was purchased (a goal to the original group), davepoobond assumed control over all the content and began to make it more towards a vision of a huge humor content archive supplemented by original content. The free hosting sites that Squackle has been represented on was Angelfire, Spaceports, and the ArcticNetwork.
The content on the site swelled to the point of it being quite unmanageable by manual HTML and SSI means over the years, which resulted in there being less and less frequent updates. It became apparent that adding a certain amount of dictionary words (alphabetically, by hand) took nearly two hours to integrate into the Dictionary, as well as taking way too long to add a page that only had a picture on it. Also, with minimal knowledge of how to actually a design a layout for a web site, the problem couldn’t be solved easily. During this period, davepoobond also began working on the gaming site GamersMark (now defunct) which also took up a lot of his time.
After a year of trying to find a suitable solution to display a massive amount of content in a manageable way, davepoobond finally decided to go with WordPress, finding that most of the things he wanted to do with the web site had already been conceptualized — it was called a blog. However, the content that would be put up in WordPress is not traditionally blog-like. It is standard humor, just like what was seen on the normal web site with some normal blogging elements.
The current goal of the site is to be a humor archive with a large emphasis on original content. Humor Archive elements generally consist of Jokes and other random types of content.
The Squackle Bulletin Board/Advertising History:
During the early days of Squackle, one of the goals laid in was to take submissions from the visiting public and post their content on the site. A good portion of the existing site came from submissions from that era, and as more people got engaged with creating content, people became more invested in the site.
The Squackle Bulletin Board was established sometime in early 2001 or so as a way to store rudimentary “user profiles” for people who submitted things on Squackle. Eventually, people began to actually post and a small community was built. Many were mostly random people who got into contact with the site somehow and a community formed around the stuff on the site and creating more content for it. It was back before MySpace/Facebook and was harder to have a “web presence” — the allure of having your stanky words on the internet was new. You couldn’t really make a web site too easily because it usually cost money or was a lot of work. A lot of that is solved nowadays with places like WordPress.com and hosting that is cheap for unlimited space/bandwidth.
Squackle was quite a bit more popular during the early 2000s, for whatever reason. There was a period of about 3 months during 2003/2004 where the site was completely down for some reason davepoobond had no control over. At the time, davepoobond wasn’t paying for hosting and was piggybacking on another guy’s server that was giving him space for free, so all he could do was just hound the guy every once in a while — but he was giving hosting for free to begin with so there wasn’t much to really do other than check in with him at intervals. davepoobond was afraid to ask his parents for money to pay for his own web server since they saw any of my computer time as frivolous despite being very productive during the time (one time they even said it was “so stupid” to be running a web site). The site eventually came back online, but not before the link integrity had diminished and Google kicked many of the pages off its search priorities.
After that occurred, people got out of the habit of posting on the forums, and the community died. Eventually the bulletin board got corrupted through the other server moves made and just general neglecting of the bulletin board itself. Around 2012, davepoobond deleted it completely, not that it worked anymore at that point. Unfortunately since its almost impossible to convert out the topics into something that can be transplanted into PHPBB3 the only record of the Bulletin Board is on the web archive here: http://web.archive.org/web/20061127051009/www.squackle.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi
Over the years, the main ways davepoobond generated buzz for Squackle was by going into chat rooms and messaging people directly to go to Squackle. During the early 2000s, davepoobond was one of the more popular Game Maker reviewers because they were funny reviews for shitty games that no one cared to review. For a brief period of time, the owner of Game Maker (at the time) asked davepoobond to help him review games for inclusion on the Game Maker game database to showcase the talents of the community and the range of the program itself.
Squackle became “The Funniest Site on the Net” after taking a look at some other humor sites, and coming to the conclusion that they were less funny. The original slogan for Squackle was being “One of the Funniest Sites on the Net” but during the redesign, it was not only shortened, but strengthened in its messaging by dropping the “One of” prefix. However, there are plenty of other slogans which have made its use over the years.
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Goals of this web site are as follow:
Archive – Archiving everything in the world that is funny into one web site. It is a mission that no one has (as far as I know) undertaken to archive every single piece of humor that has ever been conceived.
Original Content – In addition to archiving everything, original content, with a unique style of humor, is also added into the mix.
Dave’s Awful Opinions – Not-so-serious and may-even-be-informational reviews on products and other things.
The goal of Squackle is not necessarily to make money, but to serve as an outlet for creative talents (however creative or not they may be), and if you hate the content I have on my site, then so be it. I’m not going to change the way I do things unless I want to. I do this out of my own fun and motivation, and whether I get one visitor a day or five million, I will still do things the way I want to.
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Other info about the site:
– If you see a post by “A Squackler” it means that a fan or person submitted a very small amount of content and they have been shoved into a generic user name to signify that the content was submitted to the site and not found or created by myself or someone that actually will have their name portrayed on the site.
– Many posts are identified by their Post ID. If they do not have some sort of unique title, they will simply be noted by their post ID prefaced by what it is (such as “Joke #xxxxx” for a joke). They do not mean that it is, for example, the 5000th joke on the site or whatever. If there is a title, or some sort of identifier, it will be added after the Post ID. The only ID that does not have a prefix (such as “Joke”) will be the Chat Logs section.
– Any names on this web site do not refer to you. They are all made up. Please do not think that if there is a full name displayed somewhere on this site that it is you. It isn’t.
– If you see a piece of content that you believe should have another tag or belongs to a subsection that it isn’t already a part of, you are more than welcome to suggest it in a comment.
– Comments are moderated before being posted to ensure the control of spam comments. Your comments will most likely be approved in a timely manner as long as they aren’t spam or links to porn or something like that.
– If articles are in a series, you can see all of the other articles on the right sidebar.
– The official colors of Squackle are Orange and Gray with the accent color of White.
– If you notice duplicate content, please leave a comment and notify me that it is the same or very similar to something that is already on the site.
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Things we try to make “running gags” of:
- Making fun of the really small Middle Eastern Arabic Island Country of Bahrain that is off the coast of Saudi Arabia. Its a kingdom that has an economy driving on the oil reserves it owns.
- Making fun of blowthetoad.
- Making fun of ourselves.
- Dacky references in random places.