History of Lulz.net

The following covers the history and controversies of the image board Lulz.net.

2006 server move
On July 25, 2006, in preparation to moving the site to a new server, WTFur's splash page was replaced by cho0b with a fake notice from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, MPAA, and the RIAA, "informing" the viewer that:

With the addition that their IP has been logged, and to:

Clicking on "Piracy Doesn't Pay" lead to a placeholder image board on the server (/temp/,) with the title /pedofur/. Finally, until the move was completed, all hosted images were archived in a single RAR image, and uploaded to the The Pirate Bay, a BitTorrent tracker.

The original "takedown" image can be found at Vxbinaca.beevomit.org, under the section "7/24/06 FBI Takedown joke page."

Relocation changes
The board re-appeared on August 25, 2006 as "Lulz.net." A European server was also chosen due to more lax copyright rules overseas, which meant that what little of a DNP copyright protection "WTFur" had could now be completely disregarded.

Single board approach
Many visitors to Lulz take issue with the board's "hands-off" approach to posting and moderation, allowing all manner of media content (PG to X, straight, gay, vore, scat, cub art, etc...) to be posted mixed, side-by-side on the site's single board.

Though controversial, the moderators defend this choice by reasoning that it will expose users to art or artists they would not have seen otherwise, and that because users are prone to complain about posts in categories no matter how finely they are divided, dealing with those complaints in a single board only saves the moderation team a great deal of time. And so, any future requests by users to subdivide the content of the board into smaller categories, will, as stated before (see "Policies and content",) be ignored.

Moderators' actions/inactions
Furthermore, there have been accusations of the moderating staff standing idly by in the past as a direct result of these policies, when threads have been posted that users object to, but do not necessarily break any of the site's rules, or the moderation team is slow to remove spam or invasion posts from the page. Though there have been requests by a small group of users to take down threads featuring cub or commercial work, such as work by Palcomix, the moderation team does not appear to remove such material.

Cub art
When questioned in particular about 'cub porn' and the policy on the site of such material after one of many such threads caught the eye of CrushYiffDestroy, the moderators of the site responded with the following:

These policies have been in place since Lulz's inception, and, for better or worse, remain unchanged to this day.

Admin split, board shutdown
On November 30, 2006, Arcturus cut-off cho0b's access to the WTFur server, under the assumption he had given mod password access to the /furi/ board to what was thought to be "many random people." The act was largely considered damage control by the moderation team at the time, as the new user or users with this password deleted the bans in place on the page for posters of kiddie porn, bestiality and guro, and immediately afterwards banned several of the more frequent tripcode-using users.

cho0b, confused as to why he could not login to any of his sites, redirected the Lulz.net domain name. That night, Arcturus purchased the domain name Sidechan.net, and setup the DNS to point it at what was currently lulz.net, transferring all of the content from it to the new site, while deleting all data owned by cho0b hosted on his server for the websites WTFux.org, digital-jihad.net, w-t-c.info, 4-20.info, and a few others.

After cho0b inquired about the reason he did all this, Arcturus responded that it was because "You fucked with me."

Sidechan gets hacked
Only a week before Sidechan went down, cho0b (using the pseudonym jihad) said the following to Arcturus at the end of a lengthy discussion:

[jihad] i mean it might be good to think it over, you might be a bit steamed up right now [jihad] don't want to make any rash decisions :) [Arcturus] Is that a threat? [jihad] why would i need to threaten you? [jihad] it's not like i have all your information or anything like that

On January 7th, 2007, Sidechan was hacked by someone posting by the name "jihad" (believed to be cho0b), and all of the boards were wiped clean of their content, with an advertisement for lulz.net popping up on /furi/ before sidechan went down completely.

2007 (back on line)
Lulz came back on line the same day Sidechan was hacked in January 2007. The set-up is still a single board approach and a lack of a DNP.

The front-page sported a temporary photoshopped version of the Sidechan logo, with name changed to "lulz.net" (using the Disney font,) and sidechan's mascot Downsy "head-fisting" the persona of 4chan's moot.

Additional changes (3/22/07 - 5/31/07)

 * sticky threads finally implemented
 * management panel totally reworked
 * collapsed threads stay collapsed when you leave the page and come back
 * janitor panel reworked (janitors cannot ban or sticky/unsticky threads; can delete posts/images)
 * added choice to return to the current thread or go back to the main thread list after posting
 * checkbox for "bumping" a thread has been added to postform reply view
 * mods can now permasage a thread so that it cannot be bumped again
 * mods can now close a thread so that it cannot be posted to
 * Sexyfur.com/Jeremy Bernal media posting ban
 * Lulz.css style sheet completely revamped
 * Post form reworked
 * Collapsible threads implemented
 * Original post thumbnail larger than reply thumbnails
 * Added working janitor moderation panel
 * A "Dramawiki" is implemented. Its intended use is to create articles relevant to furry dramas threads originating on the site.

Onta's DMCA notifications and DreamHost cancellation of services
On March 9th 2011, Lulz.net host (DreamHost) banned the Lulz domains from their servers due to several DMCA notes. It was confirmed later on that these notes were submitted by Onta