TOTSE

Totse (TOT' see / TOTE' see, from the acronym for "Temple of the Screaming Electron"), is a bay area BBS started by Jeff Hunter, also known as "Taipan Enigma", in 1989 (a founding member of NIRVANAnet) as a dial-up BBS named "& the Temple of the Screaming Electron".

Totse became available on the World Wide Web in 1997, and in the spring of 1998 the dial-up BBS system was discontinued. Totse is home to a message forum, and is reputed to host the world's largest collection of text files.

Totse.com has a strong commitment to free speech, unlike Wikipedia, as can be seen in the diversity and occasionally unsavory nature of its articles, the fact that BBS members can post essentially anything as long as they do not become "trolls", and most especially that the first paragraph seen upon opening the Totse.com main page is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. There are some exceptions to the free speech rule: Goatse, Lemonparty, Outwar (a game where points are earned for number of times a link has been clicked), and, for a short time, the word "nigger" was banned due to spamming. It has been alleged that J.C. Stanton, one of the administrators of Totse, has banned the accounts of individuals whose politics with which he disagrees.

There are 35 individual forums on the Totse.com community bulletin board with, according to the site, approximately 34500 registered users and a staff of 5 administrators and 54 moderators (as of June 2005).

The website is occasionally featured on mainstream news networks or publications, ordinarily for members committing crimes or for particularly controversial text files. A great deal of Totse is dedicated to methods of growing/creating illicit chemical substances, as well as methods for building explosives, bioweaponry, and instructions on committing both computer and physical crimes but also contains many areas for the discussion of literature, politics and religion.

External links

• totse.com (aliases: totse.org, totse.net)