Q&A website

A Q&A website is a website where the site creators use the images of pop culture icons to answer input from the site's visitors, usually in question/answer format. This format of website evolved from the much older Internet Oracle. The original progenitor of this type of site was the now-defunct Forum 2000. The Forum 2000 claimed to have run the site by means of artificial intelligence, and the personalities on the website were called SOMADs, or "State of Mind Adjointness pairs". However, modern Q&A sites usually dispose of this pretense, with the most extreme example being Jerk Squad!, in which the administrators of the site provide many of the answers.

Initially something between a satire of and homage to the original Forum 2000, Forum 2010 made its debut on July 29, 2000. The site, which began as a college web project by Andrew Chinnici, used personas from regular patrons of the WTnet IRC channel #watertower in addition to "celebrity" personalities. A check of that site in May, 2012 took one to web host aspnix.com, whose online chat representative said could provide no further information about its client.

The Conversatron, which began to take questions December 12, 1999 was first to break the Forum 2000's format. The Conversatron made it clear that the site was not run by artificial intelligence, and called the site's personalities "Askees", in contrast to the visitors, called "Askers". The Conversatron stated in a thread that it would be "going down for permanent maintenance" at some time in early 2005, but that it may be supplanted by something "different, but still the same." Since that time, the site has been back and forth, sometimes being replaced with the cryptic message, "So, web huh."

as of 2008^[update], a Q&A site under the title "The Conversatron" exists at http://conversatron.one-thirty-seven.net/, although it remains unclear whether it is associated with the creators of the original. The source code to original Conversatron is available online.

More commonly referred to by its acronym TMOL, the site was originally started in early 2000 as a version of Forum 2000 and The Conversatron, but one that focused on the idea that videogames reflected a deep, self-actualizing message that could improve one's life. The conceit of the site was that it evangelized this videogame-centric, pseudo-Buddhist philosophy via a "Virtual Meditation Chamber", where the site's visitors, or "Supplicants", would ask for the advice or the opinion of the "Gurus". Headed by the fictional "lead Guru wrangler", The Seeker, TMOL ran from July 2000 – January 2004, and the best-of archive of this run is still available online.

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