A History Lesson
Eyejabber was originally launched on October 12, 2001 by a group of friends who were looking for a way to decompress and destress from their jobs as system administrators and a way to help deal with the tragedy of 9/11. The world seemed to have gone crazy and Eyejabber was their way to deal with it.
The name Eyejabber came from an observation one of us made while attending daily meetings for a major project we were working on. We were spending so much time attending meetings to give an updates on the progress of the project that we had very little time to actually work on the project. To break the tension of one meeting, someone picked up a pencil from the table and pretended to jab himself in the eye and yell, “I can’t take it anymore!” Someone else said, “I wonder if that domain is taken” and eyejabber.com was born.
The original content was centered around finding humor in the absurd. For example, there were stories about Osama Bin Laden toilet paper, weird and wacky news stories, cool geek toys, and the ever-present Not Safe for Work (NSFW) section. You could definitely count on Eyejabber to bring fresh content from the darkest corners of the web.
Along the way, Eyejabber became semi-famous when we unwittingly hosted some images from another now-defunct website because they were getting hit with a lot of traffic. The images were purportedly of a young woman who was involved in a scandal with a famous basketball player. As it turns out, the images were not even of the person in question but the mainstream media descended on our little site with a vengence and held us up as an example of everything that’s wrong with the Internet. Of course, the images were removed very quickly and we apologized for our lack of good judgement, but not before we were profiled in a newspaper article about the incident.
The community that formed around Eyejabber was just as sick and twisted as we were. We started with some forums for our readers to participate and eventually started hosting nightly chat sessions and invited our readers to join in the fun. We played fun games, got to know each other, and just had a good time.
Unfotunately, “real life” gets in the way sometimes and the original founders of Eyejabber are no exception. They returned to school, got married, had kids, changed careers, pursued other interests and grew up (well, most of us did). By 2005, the original software we started Eyejabber with was no longer being maintained and was full of security holes. On an almost nightly basis, someone ran a script against the site that took over the admin account and defaced the site. With no way or inclination to fix the holes, we just restored the database and continued on.
In 2007, we made some attempts to migrate the old site intact (content, users, comments, and forums) to new software that was more secure. We hired a programmer to help us with the conversion, but for one reason or another it never worked out. After over a year of trying, the project was abandoned.
The Relaunch
In July 2009, we finally got back together and decided that something had to be done about Eyejabber. It was too much a part of our lives to just let it languish in obscurity. The new and improved Eyejabber has been relaunched on modern software with an active and caring development community; one that has security in mind.
Unfortunately, the task of migrating all of the old content to the new site is just too daunting of a task. Instead, we will be revisiting old posts on a regular basis through the “Classic Eyejabber” series. You won’t be disappointed.
Although Eyejabber is aimed at a slightly older and more mature audience than before, we hope that you will find something that makes you laugh or at least makes you think.
Community
The community is always what made Eyejabber worth doing and we want your participation. We enourage you to subscribe to our feeds, follow us on Twitter, leave comments, visit our Disqus Community page, share our stories via the buttons on each post, and tell your friends about us. As the community grows and forms, we’ll definitely be adding more ways come together and talk about what’s important to you.
Eyejabber Defined
The Urban Dictionary has several definitions for Eyejabber. Maybe you should go add your own?
- Eyejabber Staff
admin (at) eyejabber dot com