Something Awful, often abbreviated to SA, is a comedy website housing a wide variety of content, including feature articles, digitally edited pictures, and humorous media reviews.
The site was created by Richard Kyanka in 1999 as a largely personal website, but as the site grew, its list of contributors and content grew as well. Since then, the website and forums have grown to be influential on the Internet
Something Awful has also been involved in some conflicts over its history, such as an eventually satisfied tax warrant against the site; a confrontation between the Spam Prevention Early Warning System and forum members, which almost led to a DDoS attack by Something Awful's forum members; and having a Hurricane Katrina charity Paypal account frozen and caught in bureaucratic red tape.

History
Kyanka was challenged to a boxing match with Uwe Boll over criticism of Boll's movie found on Something Awful.

Uwe Boll fight
Something Awful is home to a variety of humorous content, including photo manipulation, parodies, pranks, satirical reviews of products, and reviews of obviously poor websites, video games, and movies. The material is written by several different editors, and occasionally by members of its forums as well. On July 12, 2005, David Thorpe —the author of the features Your Band Sucks and Fashion SWAT— "represented" the website on G4's Attack of the Show, although he made several absurd claims, such as that the site started up as a monster truck rally newsletter and that the forums were a front for a cult that required a registration fee of $80 per month.

Site content
The site is home to a collection of Internet forums, which have the unusual characteristics of charging a one-time registration fee of US$9.95 and fees ranging from US$4.99 to US$9.99 for additional features. The forums have helped to perpetuate several Internet memes, such as All your base are belong to us

Entertainment Weekly prank

Conflicts
In December 2003, prosecutors in Thurston County, Washington filed charges against Something Awful, LLC for failure to pay taxes on revenue. The tax warrant was satisfied in March 2004 and vacated in 2005.

SPEWS controversy
Since the website's servers were located in New Orleans, the site temporarily went offline in August 2005 during the flooding from Hurricane Katrina. After the site was brought to a semi-functional state, Kyanka set up a link to a PayPal account where people could donate money to the survivors of the hurricane via the Red Cross. Kyanka put in $3,000 of his own money, Kyanka has subsequently encouraged his users to boycott PayPal.