dct.com/~dapackfan/ccnow (1995) (Archived Copy)
highersource.org (1997) (Archived Copy)
The mother of all spoofs. So, you remember those Heaven's Gate freaks? The 39 guys who put on Nike shoes and purple shrouds, then killed themselves? Yeah, those freaks. They also happened to run a (quite horribly done) web design business. The media latched onto this and basically associated any webmaster with a cultist. We obviously weren't going to take this.
The opportunity presented itself when CNN said their business web site as "ww.highersource.org" (only two w's, and it was supposed to be .com, not .org). Well, Varak was working at Internic at the time, and was able to register highersource.org. With about a dozen people and 10 hours of work, we had the parody site up. And boy did it get popular. Millions upon millions of hits. The poor little box it was hosted on nearly melted. And the media picked up on it too. Kinda ironic since those were the people we were blasting. For example, I was quoted in Newsweek. Others in the group got actual interviews for major publications! To this day, when I tell our story, occasionally I'll get "oh yeah, I remember that!"
Sadly, all good things must come to an end. Binky, the web server that hosted highersource.org, died a spectacular death. No backups of the site were made. It wasn't until archive.org made their historical web archive public was I able to get a copy of the site. Payment on the domain itself lapsed, and was picked up by a domain squatter. But the legacy lives on.
finnie.org/snuffy_dpf (1998) (Archived Copy)
finnie.org/mastercard (1999) (Archived Copy)
suelars.com (2000) (Archived Copy)
This was actually a spoof of a spoof. In 2000, Metallica, vocally led by drummer Lars Ulrich, sued now-defunct Napster and tried to get the logs of anyone who had downloaded a Metallica song in order to threaten them. paylars.com was started so that people could donate money to Lars Ulrich for all of the supposed lost revenue they had incurred. I thought I'd take that one step further and set up suelars.com. The idea was to have everybody who was affected by the current situation sign up for a class action lawsuit against Lars Ulrich.
To this date, this is the only spoof where I actually made money. I set up an affiliate account with Ask Jeeves and put up interactive banners at the top of each page with the default question as "Can Metallica sue me for listening to my own CDs?" It was a complete success. 32% click though ratio, netting me about $171. The frequency of how many people "searched" for that question got the attention of Ask Jeeves. The web site got passed along within the company, resulting in a ton of visits from ask.com. I talked to a couple engineers there, and they set it up so that any question concerning Metallica or Lars Ulrich showed suelars.com as the top result.
webpinto.com (2001) (Archived Copy)
WebVan closed down in mid-2000
XXX Finish writing intros - blah blah threatafiliass.info (2001) (Archived Copy)
arouse.net/jesus (2001)
hippie.info (2002) (Archived Copy)
arouse.net/x10 (2002)
protectbigotry.com (2002) (Archived Copy)
arouse.net/despair-linux (2004)