Doomworld



Doomworld is one of the oldest unofficial news websites dedicated to the Doom games (DoomGate is slightly older). The site was founded on March 13, 1998 by Andrew Stine (Linguica), Gaston Lahaut (Mordeth), and Javier Heredia (Dukrous); the site is part of the AtomicGamer network (of TeleFragged LLC). Of the original founders, only Stine and Lahaut remain, but the amount of total members on the staff has grown almost three-fold.

In addition to Doom related news, Doomworld also hosts the weekly /newstuff Chronicles reviews of new WADs uploaded to the idgames archive and a database of the archive with search, user comment, and mirror access capabilities. The site also provides informational resources about Doom and associated games, hosting of Doom websites, and a forum with over 15,000 registered users and 1,520,000 posts as of February 2016.

Doomworld received some mention in mainstream media in 1999 due to the controversy surrounding the Columbine High School Massacre and shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's obsession with the Doom games. It gained some renown in the same year after Andrew Stine convinced John Carmack to allow the site to redistribute the Doom source code under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Forums
Doomworld provides a set of forums. Discussion areas are provided for Classic Doom and Doom 3, as well as the “Everything Else” general discussion forum and areas for discussion of news and hosted sites. The forum software used is vBulletin.

Trivia

 * Instead of threads and posts being deleted, they are instead sent to "Post Hell". In contrast to the rest of the forums, Post Hell features a bright orange theme as well as an animated flame effect at the bottom of the window. Fredrik is featured at the top of Post Hell.
 * Troublemakers are generally not banned outright from the site, but instead “losered”. Losered people can only post in a single forum, “Losers”, which is invisible to normal users. Depending on whether or not the reason they were "Loser'd" for is serious or not, or whether they continue to fool around in the Loser section, they may be given their accounts back and access to the rest of the forums will be allowed again. When this happens, the Loser section will become inaccessible again.
 * The pink fish first appeared on Doomworld. It is common for people to have fish as their avatars.
 * It is not possible for a normal user to set a custom title. Instead, titles are given out by administrators in randomly timed “title giveaways”, or set in response to behaviour on the forums.
 * The Doomworld forums inspired a series of joke WADs. An anonymous mapper created dwforums.wad as a parody of the forums. The mapper later followed up with dwforums2.wad and dwforums3.wad.

Notable articles & features

 * 5 Years of Doom (1998)
 * 10 Years of Doom (2003)
 * Top 100 WADs of All Time
 * Top 10 Infamous WADs
 * Cacowards (recurring annually since 2004)
 * The /newstuff Chronicles