User:TrackerTV/Serebii.net

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**Serebii.net**
Image:Spp layout.PNG
URL	http://www.serebii.net
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Specialized website community/informational, Pokémon fansite
Registration	Optional
Owner	Joseph Merrick (Serebii)
Created by	Joseph Merrick (Serebii)

Serebii.net or SPP (short for Serebii's Pokémon Pages)[1] is a Pokémon fansite, represented by the Pokémon Celebi (while in Japanese the Pokémon is called Celebi, the name phonetically is spelled as Serebii in katakana), as Celebi is the creator's favorite Pokémon as well as his primary internet persona. The website features an expansive Pokédex, summaries for the anime episodes and Pokémon Adventures manga, thorough game information, and card game information. Serebii.net is not endorsed, sponsored, or funded by Nintendo, Game Freak, or any of their sponsors or affiliates.

1 Community
2 Rise to Popularity/Server Issues
3 Hacking problems
4 Trivia
5 External links

[edit] Community

Serebii.net's forum has over 100,000 members and over two million posts [2]. The member count only includes members who have been active in the last three months; not the total members who have joined, since accounts that are inactive are deleted after a set period of time. Discussions range from the anime, games, and forum games such as "Rate my Signature". There is also a miscellaneous section for non-Pokémon topics such as polls and debates. During recasting of voice actors in the Pokémon anime, a few, new and old, have joined the forums to answer questions and get feedback from users [3].

[edit] Rise to Popularity/Server Issues

SPP was created by Joseph Merrick, better known as Serebii to his users and often called "Joe" by his peers, on October 16, 1999^{[citation needed]} . SPP became popular when it was a GeoCities website. Ever since 2002, when it became a major Pokémon website, it has suffered from a number of server problems and downtimes, sometimes up to six months long. The forum community has had even more problems with Serebii Forums, which are reported to have varying downtimes multiple times a day. This was remedied on August 18th, 2006[4] when Serebii called in professional help to try and improve the server the forums were based on. The forums still suffer from downtimes, but they are significantly less frequent than they were before.

[edit] Hacking problems

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On the 4th of September, 2006, Serebii.net's domain name was taken over. Some users of the site's forums had reported that the link www.serebii.net redirected to Pojo, Smogon, Wikipedia's article on Huntail (which was also vandalized) and even a Digimon web site. It is currently unknown whether any of these sites had anything to do with the incident.

Soon after the rapid switching of redirect pages, the link www.serebii.net brought users to a mock Serebii Forums page hosted on www.fortunecity.com, which was filled with pictures of incestual hentai and hardcore pornography. After notification by MisterCow of the SPP chat room, Fortune City staff has since removed the offending material.

Following the pornographic material, www.serebii.net was then made to link to a Hulk Hogan fansite, located at hulkhogan.co.uk, but was changed yet again to redirect to a video hosted by Google entitled "The Oncoming Storm," which is a reference to Serebii's latest site improvement project of the same name. The link was soon changed again to redirect to the LiveJournal blog of fanha, former maker of a Pokemon IRC bot^{[citation needed]} . His blog is entitled "Foolishness to the World," but the hackers had edited the title bar so that it read "Diary of a Quintessentially Misguided Prat" when viewed via the address www.serebii.net.

Hours after the redirect made to the "Diary of a Quintessentially Misguided Prat," the site appeared to have returned to normal, although it had not been fully restored, per se. The providers of the domain made it so that www.serebii.net redirected to the alternate URL for SPP.

Image:Invertedsppf.png

Serebii.net Forums, on September 4th, 2006, during the domain hack.

Soon after the hacking of the domain, Serebii.net forums were hacked with the layout horizontally inverted, and several moderators and staff demoted or banned, including Serebii himself. The forum has since been restored, although following attempts to takeover again soon after have failed.

The next day, the fifth of September, the domain was hacked yet again[5]. It was then made to redirect to Bulbagarden. It was then redirected to a site entitled "Finnigan's Wake," then to a Pokémon fansite entitled "UPNetwork." It was changed yet again to redirect to a picture hosted on TinyPic, which appeared to be one of the winners of the 10th Pokémon Anniversary Journey Across America^{[citation needed]} . The picture has since been removed from TinyPic.

www.serebii.net also previously linked to YouTube. The videos that it linked to were "Does your dog have the Buddha-nature?", "SWEET TRANSVESTITE", "YouTube - Pokemon",and "Masturbation Testimonial."

On the dawn of the sixth of September, www.serebii.net had still not been reclaimed. It linked to a YouTube video titled "Long Live Martha" and a video containing someone playing the piano (Ravel's Jeux D'eau played by Martha Argerich) earlier in the day. Soon after, the site redirected to a broken link on agnph.com.

An announcement posted by Serebii at 4:42p.m. later that day announced that the site had been returned to normal. [6]

The significance of and relation between any of the pages that www.serebii.net linked to during the takeover is unclear at the moment. However, the redirects to Pojo and Smogon have lead some SPP users to believe that the owners of those sites hacked SPP's domain name, but this is currently nothing more than a rumor, considering Pojo's Pokémon site is linking to Serebii.net's back up site with a note from Serebii, who is a good friend of Pojo. Coincidentally, Smogon, another well-known Pokémon fansite, was also down at the time of the September 4th takeover, presumably due to the earlier redirects affecting their bandwidth.

On the 24th of September, Serebii himself caused a hacking scare by inverting the forum layout in a way similar to that of the September 4th forum hack. His reasons for doing so were boredom, and he was curious to "see how long it'd be before someone screamed 'hack.'" [7]

[edit] Trivia

Maddie Blaustein, the former voice actor for the Pokémon anime's Meowth, is a member who goes by the name maddiejoan. She has a Q&A on the Serebii.net forums. [8]
On the 30th of September, 2006, Serebii.net broke the 200,000 unique daily visitors barrier.[9]