Neopets is a virtual pet website. Users can own virtual pets ("Neopets"), and buy virtual items for them using one of two virtual currencies. One currency, called Neopoints, can be earned within the site, and the other, Neocash, can either be purchased with real-world money, or won by chance in-game.
RPGnet is a role-playing game website. It includes sections on wargames, tabletop games and video games, as well as columns on gaming topics.
Slashdot is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site users and editors. Each story has a comments section attached to it where users can add online comments. The website was founded in 1997 by Hope College students Rob Malda, also known as "CmdrTaco", and classmate Jeff Bates, also known as "Hemos". In 2012, they sold it to DHI Group, Inc.. In January 2016, BizX acquired Slashdot Media, including both slashdot.org and SourceForge.
A virtual economy is an emergent economy existing in a virtual world, usually exchanging virtual goods in the context of an Internet game. People enter these virtual economies for recreation and entertainment rather than necessity, which means that virtual economies lack the aspects of a real economy that are not considered to be "fun". However, some people do interact with virtual economies for "real" economic benefit.
Shacknews, commonly referred to as "The Shack", is a website offering news, features, editorial content, and forums relating to computer games and console games. Shacknews is currently owned by Gamerhub Content Network. Previous owners, Steve Gibson and Maarten Goldstein, sold the site to Gamefly after providing independent gaming journalism for over a decade. Gamerhub Content Network purchased the site in January 2014.
Plastic.com (2001–2011) was a general-interest internet forum running under the motto 'Recycling the Web in Real Time'.
Gaia Online is an English-language, anime-themed social networking and forums-based website. It was founded as go-gaia on February 18, 2003, and the name was changed to GaiaOnline.com in 2004 by its owner, Gaia Interactive. Gaia originally began as an anime linklist and eventually developed a small community, but following a statement by founder Derek Liu, the website moved towards social gaming, and eventually became forum-based. In 2007, over a million posts were made daily, and 7 million unique users visited each month. Gaia also won the 2007 Webware 100 award in the Community category and was included in Time Magazine's list of 50 best websites in 2008. In January 2011, the company won the Mashable Best User experience Award for 2010.
SlashNET is a medium-sized, independently operated Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network. Originally sponsored by Slashdot and founded in 1998, in 1999 SlashNET split off to become its own entity. A few well-known communities and projects maintain an IRC presence at SlashNET, including #g7, #totse (Totse), #idiots-club, #mefi, various Penny Arcade-related communities, #Twitterponies, and #rags. As of 2012 it is ranked in the top 40 networks by IRC.Netsplit.de, with an estimated relatively constant 1700 users, and #25/737 by SearchIRC.com.
TV.com is a website owned by CBS Interactive. The site covers television and focuses on English-language shows made or broadcast in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom. It emphasizes user-generated content. Australia and UK versions of the website are also available, at au.tv.com and uk.tv.com, respectively.
The Vault Network, or VN, was a game network dedicated to role-playing video games, providing gamers with information such as news, editorials, guides, hints and tips, as well as discussion. The Vault Network consists of RPG Vault, the Vault Wiki and the VN Boards, as well as several other hosted sites, called "Vaults", dedicated to specific game titles or topics. The Vaults use a single, unified discussion forum for all their websites, resulting in a combined total of about 40,000 to 50,000 posts a day, over 400+ forums. Together, this group of message boards is known as the VN Boards. The VNBoards are consistently ranked very high on the list of most active Internet forums.
LibraryThing is a social cataloging web application for storing and sharing book catalogs and various types of book metadata. It is used by authors, individuals, libraries, and publishers.
Brock Pierce is an American entrepreneur known for his work in the cryptocurrency industry. As a child actor, he was in Disney films The Mighty Ducks (1992), D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994), and First Kid (1996).
A social news website is an Internet website that features user-posted stories. Such stories are ranked based on popularity, as voted on by other users of the site or by website administrators. Users typically comment online on the news posts and these comments may also be ranked in popularity. Since their emergence with the birth of Web 2.0, social news sites have been used to link many types of information, including news, humor, support, and discussion. All such websites allow the users to submit content and each site differs in how the content is moderated. On the Slashdot and Fark websites, administrators decide which articles are selected for the front page. On Reddit and Digg, the articles that get the most votes from the community of users will make it to the front page. Many social news websites also feature an online comment system, where users discuss the issues raised in an article. Some of these sites have also applied their voting system to the comments, so that the most popular comments are displayed first. Some social news websites also have a social networking function, in that users can set up a user profile and follow other users' online activity on the website.
GameFAQs is a website that hosts FAQs and walkthroughs for video games. It was created in November 1995 by Jeff Veasey and was bought by CNET Networks in May 2003. It is currently owned by CBS Interactive. The site has a database of video game information, cheat codes, reviews, game saves, box art images and screenshots, almost all of which is submitted by volunteer contributors. The systems covered include the 8-bit Atari platform through modern consoles, as well as computer games and mobile games. Submissions made to the site are reviewed by the site's current editor, Allen "SBAllen" Tyner.
The Slashdot effect, also known as slashdotting, occurs when a popular website links to a smaller website, causing a massive increase in traffic. This overloads the smaller site, causing it to slow down or even temporarily become unavailable. The name stems from the huge influx of web traffic which would result from the technology news site Slashdot linking to websites. The original circumstances have changed, as flash crowds from Slashdot were reported in 2005 to be diminishing due to competition from similar sites, and the general adoption of elastically scalable cloud hosting platforms. The effect has been associated with other websites or metablogs such as Fark, Digg, Drudge Report, Imgur, Reddit, and Twitter, leading to terms such as being "farked" or "drudged", being under the "Reddit effect"—or receiving a "hug of death" from the site in question. Google Doodles, which link to search results on the doodle topic, also result in high increases of traffic from the search results page. Typically, less robust sites are unable to cope with the huge increase in traffic and become unavailable – common causes are lack of sufficient data bandwidth, servers that fail to cope with the high number of requests, and traffic quotas. Sites that are maintained on shared hosting services often fail when confronted with the Slashdot effect.
