Forkies: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 23:49, 20 June 2022

Fact: Forkies used to look like this, before they became humans. (Shikashikashika~~!)

A "Forkie" is a nickname typically given to someone who maliciously causes destruction or otherwise renders the virtual machines unusable to annoy, intimidate and/or troll users of CollabVM.

Although their name derives from the term "fork bomb", they do not exclusively run fork bombs. A forkie may also run an executable which prevents anything from opening, deleting the registry, or other methods of blocking usability on the VM. Anti-forkies also have the same purpose, except the premise is to stop forkies from forking the VM, despite the fact that it, in and of itself, is a forkie.

Not too long ago, a vote to reset button was added to combat forkies along with a customized task manager (and later a customized command prompt), which is mostly actually successful at defeating nearly every forkie, although a forkie will eventually figure out how to bypass it and break the VM again immediately afterwards.

Forkies were not only present on CollabVM - they were also known to be present on the similar (but now defunct) website known as socket.computer, wecan.hasthe.technology, the Virus Farm and the like.

According to old documentation and (then) recent history, forkies have appeared to be successful business entreprenurs and have managed to assemble their very own restaurant! Dubbed Forkies Real Food Parlor and located in Lynnwood, Pretoria (?) South Africa, they have managed to score many customers and serve great Italian food! (Not rat poison surprisingly)

The restaurant has been since closed at one point in April(?) 2018.

Is being a "Forkie" a bannable offense?

Many users have questioned if being a Forkie is a bannable offense.

The short answer is: If the moderation team is online, sometimes but mostly no.

The long answer is that, if you have a very long streak of making the VM unusable, you might be banned. Or if you break a global site rule. For instance, creating an executable which DDoSed someone (assuming someone would have already knew about your intentions and reported it to the administration, or the administration is on the VM and has formally recognized it as a DDOSing attempt), you would likely be banned permanently.

Nowadays, there is now a rule in place on the site, dubbed Rule 9 of the CollabVM website, in which if you constantly make the VM unusable (t. textbook definition of Forkies), or run a certain banned script, or attempt to overwrite the VM's operating system with one another (t. Installfagging), it is constituted a rule violation.

While uncommon, constantly breaking the VM can also result in a ban, if a majority of members vote to have you banned from the VMs. This usually only happens however if you excessively abuse the VMs. You won't be banned for simply running malware or fork bombs or whatever once on the VMs, though others will find it very annoying.