CMUG's 15 Minutes of Infamy

When Jesse got this message, we had not yet received any "hateful words and pornography," and our web-site had not come crashing down because we had exceeded any bandwidth limits, so we merely shrugged our shoulders, raised our eyebrows, and went about our business.

Over the course of the next few days, however, we did get one or two e-mails which were obvious attempts at trolling. One person even subscribed to the Mac Ministry e-mail list and responded to a half-dozen messages with the thought-provoking quip: "Get a Windows you (expletive omitted) Mac freak!" This gentleman, who somehow managed to misspell the four-letter word he chose to use, was promptly removed from the list.

It was at that point that I decided to go check out somethingawful.com to see if CMUG really was being mentioned as the "Awful Link of the Day."

By the time I visited somethingawful.com, the link to CMUG had been shuffled to an archive page, and the site's authors had moved on to ridiculing some Asian kid whose personal web-site was devoted to discussing his favorite Yu-Gi-Oh cartoons. With a little digging, however, I did find the page that listed CMUG as the Awful Link of the Day. Below is somethingawful.com's description of the CMUG web-site:

Separate out the author's ramblings about the similarities between OS wars and religious flamefests, and all this guy really has to say about CMUG is that we've "somehow found a connection" between the operating system we use and Christ. Gee, that's a damning criticism if ever there was one! Then he makes a bad pun about Jesus "hanging around" (one which I'm not sure he was smart enough to have made intentionally), and insinuates that CMUG's purpose was to connect Christianity with Mac devotion in order to form the "ultimate religious experience." It's clear from all this that this gentleman has no concept of what CMUG is all about; which, simply stated, is to help Christian Mac users get the most out of their Macs. Instead, he just assumes that we have chosen to combine two fanaticisms into one.

The brief description quoted above was then followed by a few exemplary quotations from articles on the CMUG web-site. The first was from my Bully Pulpit response to Kim Komando's unfavorable review of the G4 iMac, in which I stated that "the real 'edge' that Windows has over the Mac is the number of clueless people out there who can't imagine that a computer could really do more than what they're 'used to.'" That was a pretty good quote, and taken out of context, it did make it sound as though I was your typical anti-Windows Mac fanatic. But apparently the writer of this review didn't read my article too carefully, since my use of the word "assinine" to describe one of Ms. Komando's statements would have sounded much more inflammatory, and possibly even "un-Christian."

The second quote was, to my way of thinking, entirely innocuous. It came from the article Who Says There's No Christian Software for the Mac? in which I wrote: "When it comes to Bible study software, Mac users have far fewer choices than their Windows-using brethren. But who cares? As with other kinds of software, what the Mac lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality." How this shows that CMUG has combined religious fanaticism with Mac fanaticism is beyond me, but apparently, this was the best the reviewer from somethingawful.com could come up with.

What kind of fallout did we receive from our "fifteen minutes" of infamy? As I said, we got nothing more than a couple of private e-mails, and one guy briefly causing trouble on the Mac-Ministry list -- hardly the doomsday experience we were warned about. This led me to wonder if somethingawful.com was all a big nothing, an obscure site created by mean-spirited people with nothing better to do than criticize those they don't agree with. I even began to suspect that the original e-mail warning was sent by one of the creators of somethingawful.com as a way to garner attention and to inflate their perceived influence.

After checking the statistics for CMUG's monthly web traffic, however, it is clear that there are a lot of people who frequent somethingawful.com and who follow the "Awful Link of the Day." CMUG received a huge amount of traffic in the days immediately following this little bit of negative publicity. In fact, the traffic the site received in that four day period accounts for no less than 70% of the total traffic for the month of February! That makes for a pretty sharp spike in the line graph!

From the server statistics it seems clear that somethingawful.com is for real and that it really does have a significant following. Whether out of curiosity or malice, a lot of people visited CMUG last month because somebody had told them it was "awful." The vast majority of these people, however, went on surfing without taking the time to send vindictive e-mails or otherwise harass us.

Why is that? I'd like to think that it's because CMUG didn't live up to the "awful" billing it received. Contrary to what the readers of that review might have thought, CMUG is not about "OS wars" and "religious flamefests," but about helping Christians better use their Macs in service to Christ. And let the record show: there is not a single "animated fire gif" to be found anywhere on this site!

If the readers of somethingawful.com came here looking for an easy target, I'd like to believe that they left quietly because they didn't find one. At CMUG, we believe that Christ is best served, and the Mac's advantages best communicated, through careful reasoning and calm discourse, rather than through dogmatic assertions and heated invective. And while we might use the word "assinine" every now and then, we'll do our best to make sure we give no ammunition to those who would accuse CMUG of being "something awful."


				Fifteen Minutes of Infamy CMUG gets listed as the "Awful Link of the Day" by David Lang (Posted: 3/7/03)
		Last month, our webmaster, Jesse, received the following message via e-mail: If you're wondering why there's so many hate mails coming your way, and why your message boards and/or guestbooks are flooded with hateful words and pornography, perhaps I can tell you why. Your site was featured as "Awful Link of the Day" at somethingawful.com Lowtax, SA owner, uses ALOD to launch terror attacks against "lesser" quality web sites, in attempt to either intimidate webmaster, or to get sites to shut down for good, in which case, both have happened over time. Recently, He has attacked over 75 sites in 3 days, and sucessfully shut down most of them, due to bandwidth limits. When Jesse got this message, we had not yet received any "hateful words and pornography," and our web-site had not come crashing down because we had exceeded any bandwidth limits, so we merely shrugged our shoulders, raised our eyebrows, and went about our business. Over the course of the next few days, however, we did get one or two e-mails which were obvious attempts at trolling. One person even subscribed to the Mac Ministry e-mail list and responded to a half-dozen messages with the thought-provoking quip: "Get a Windows you (expletive omitted) Mac freak!" This gentleman, who somehow managed to misspell the four-letter word he chose to use, was promptly removed from the list. It was at that point that I decided to go check out somethingawful.com to see if CMUG really was being mentioned as the "Awful Link of the Day." The "ultimate religious experience" By the time I visited somethingawful.com, the link to CMUG had been shuffled to an archive page, and the site's authors had moved on to ridiculing some Asian kid whose personal web-site was devoted to discussing his favorite Yu-Gi-Oh cartoons. With a little digging, however, I did find the page that listed CMUG as the Awful Link of the Day. Below is somethingawful.com's description of the CMUG web-site: The Christian Macintosh Users Group (thanks Chris) - OS wars and religion flamefests are a lot alike; both feature rabid fanboys shouting at each other in the vain attempt that one of them will suddenly come around to their way of thinking or possibly die. The Windows vs. Mac debate has been going on for years, and unfortunately the people who advocate and promote these pointless arguments still haven't found themselves in the Darwin Award Winners group yet. Religious Internet folk are just as bad, writing page after page of religious propaganda designed to suddenly make people like me proclaim, "you know what, everything in my life suddenly makes sense now that this guy with the animated fire gif told me about how a bearded man was nailed to a wooden cross thousands of years ago!" I've got no problem with people wasting their time arguing about operating systems or religions, just as long as these people do it with handguns and somebody's basement somewhere. Welcome to "The Christian Macintosh Users Group," a website which has somehow found a connection between the operating system you run and Christ. I know if Jesus was hanging around here right about now, he'd just be pleased as punch to learn that somebody has finally connected the dots together and formed the ultimate religious experience. Separate out the author's ramblings about the similarities between OS wars and religious flamefests, and all this guy really has to say about CMUG is that we've "somehow found a connection" between the operating system we use and Christ. Gee, that's a damning criticism if ever there was one! Then he makes a bad pun about Jesus "hanging around" (one which I'm not sure he was smart enough to have made intentionally), and insinuates that CMUG's purpose was to connect Christianity with Mac devotion in order to form the "ultimate religious experience." It's clear from all this that this gentleman has no concept of what CMUG is all about; which, simply stated, is to help Christian Mac users get the most out of their Macs. Instead, he just assumes that we have chosen to combine two fanaticisms into one. The brief description quoted above was then followed by a few exemplary quotations from articles on the CMUG web-site. The first was from my Bully Pulpit response to Kim Komando's unfavorable review of the G4 iMac, in which I stated that "the real 'edge' that Windows has over the Mac is the number of clueless people out there who can't imagine that a computer could really do more than what they're 'used to.'" That was a pretty good quote, and taken out of context, it did make it sound as though I was your typical anti-Windows Mac fanatic. But apparently the writer of this review didn't read my article too carefully, since my use of the word "assinine" to describe one of Ms. Komando's statements would have sounded much more inflammatory, and possibly even "un-Christian." The second quote was, to my way of thinking, entirely innocuous. It came from the article Who Says There's No Christian Software for the Mac? in which I wrote: "When it comes to Bible study software, Mac users have far fewer choices than their Windows-using brethren. But who cares? As with other kinds of software, what the Mac lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality." How this shows that CMUG has combined religious fanaticism with Mac fanaticism is beyond me, but apparently, this was the best the reviewer from somethingawful.com could come up with. Legends in Their Own Minds? What kind of fallout did we receive from our "fifteen minutes" of infamy? As I said, we got nothing more than a couple of private e-mails, and one guy briefly causing trouble on the Mac-Ministry list -- hardly the doomsday experience we were warned about. This led me to wonder if somethingawful.com was all a big nothing, an obscure site created by mean-spirited people with nothing better to do than criticize those they don't agree with. I even began to suspect that the original e-mail warning was sent by one of the creators of somethingawful.com as a way to garner attention and to inflate their perceived influence. After checking the statistics for CMUG's monthly web traffic, however, it is clear that there are a lot of people who frequent somethingawful.com and who follow the "Awful Link of the Day." CMUG received a huge amount of traffic in the days immediately following this little bit of negative publicity. In fact, the traffic the site received in that four day period accounts for no less than 70% of the total traffic for the month of February! That makes for a pretty sharp spike in the line graph! *So Why the Lackluster Response?* From the server statistics it seems clear that somethingawful.com is for real and that it really does have a significant following. Whether out of curiosity or malice, a lot of people visited CMUG last month because somebody had told them it was "awful." The vast majority of these people, however, went on surfing without taking the time to send vindictive e-mails or otherwise harass us. Why is that? I'd like to think that it's because CMUG didn't live up to the "awful" billing it received. Contrary to what the readers of that review might have thought, CMUG is not about "OS wars" and "religious flamefests," but about helping Christians better use their Macs in service to Christ. And let the record show: there is not a single "animated fire gif" to be found anywhere on this site! If the readers of somethingawful.com came here looking for an easy target, I'd like to believe that they left quietly because they didn't find one. At CMUG, we believe that Christ is best served, and the Mac's advantages best communicated, through careful reasoning and calm discourse, rather than through dogmatic assertions and heated invective. And while we might use the word "assinine" every now and then, we'll do our best to make sure we give no ammunition to those who would accuse CMUG of being "something awful."

				David Lang is CMUG's Content Editor. David works as a developer of Accordance Bible Software, and lives in Maitland, Florida with his wife and four children.