Forkies

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An example of a CollabVM machine after being destroyed by a "Forkie"

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. They are often unfortunately categorized by CollabVM users via the F-slur. It is likely the side effect of the many 4chan raids that took place through the site's history, infecting it with its toxic culture and terminology, creating bad habits in the many of people who would go on to use the site, more likely than not being completely unaware of its derogatory meaning, and forming a toxic community from years of anarchy-like rule.

Although their name derives from the term "fork bomb" (and was the original definition of Forkie), they do not exclusively run forkbombs. A forkie may also run an executable which prevents anything from opening, deleting the registry, or other methods of blocking usability on the VM. Sometimes, through various ways.

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.

Usually, their attempts will get foiled by either the protections in place or the CollabNet web filter.

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. They are not even exclusive to any of those places either - they exist pretty much anywhere on any establishment with publicly accessible machines that anyone can use.

Incidentally, a Forkie is also the name of an enemy from Super Mario RPG. It is not supposed to be a reference to the game - it is merely a coincidence.

Is being a "Forkie" a bannable offense?

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

The short answer is: Sometimes but mostly no. You won't get banned permanently if you do it once or twice, but you will face infractions if the staff is online at the time of forking. If you fork the VM while an administrator is online and doing something important, you should fully expect one, as they have the right to ban you for any reason. In this case, it constitutes as disrupting the staff and being a nuisance.

The long answer is that, if you have a very long streak of making the VM unusable, you'll get banned, as that is violation of Rule 9 (constantly forking the VM multiple times) and qualifies as a site ban. 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 staff, or the staff is on the VM and has recognized it as a DDOSing attempt), you would likely be banned permanently.

A Forkies logo??

The logo in question

At one point there used to be a particular logo which belonged to a restaurant, which is commonly associated with CollabVM forkies. Why, more importantly, where did it all come from? Well, the context for that also ties to how Forkies got their name, which we will cover later on in this section.

Not too long ago, there used to be a restaurant located in South Africa named "Forkies Real Food Parlour", which sold various things such as baked meals, Cuban-style pressed sandwiches, pizza in different flavors ("Oh My Veggies", "The Pig", "Jamaica Me Crazy", "Signature", "Autograph", great names by the way), and pizza pie ("Fork-Off Chicken"), along with craft beer ("Boston Breweries: Naked Mexican", "Darling Breweries: Gypsy Mask", "Jack Black: Lumberjack"), local beer, imported beer, ciders and coolers, whisky, a cocktail ("Cuba Libre"), Brampton wine, craft iced tea and tisers / sparkling/still water / coffee ("Pour-over (Brazilian: Single Origin)").

They had a website, which was infamously used as a "forkie" tool to lag out everybody on the site (at the time this was when the server was still using PNG without any compression to display the VM picture, this was early 1.2.x era) back in 2016. This was because the site has many large, animating graphics which was incredibly CPU intensive (it also lagged the VM in and out of itself out because CollabVM was running on a cheap VPS at the time). Later on, it got mirrored on its own as "Last Resort" on collabvm.org, which used to be a CollabVM portal where the first CollabVM FTP before it was made official was hosted, before it got replaced with the now-dead CollabVM Anarchy Wiki.

You can't do this as much anymore, because the server as well as the hosting has upgraded a lot since then. The original forkies.com site also went down as well, along with the restaurant attached to it, perfectly sealing its fate.

See also

• FTP Forkies