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Well this is gross. The users of the anarchic message board populated mostly by bored nerds called 4chan and those of the hip, minimalist blogging platform called Tumblr are having a trolling feud right now (as planned, as we reported earlier) in which they try to DDoS each other's sites by overloading each other's servers with gross porn and cute kitties respectively.

The fight peaked Sunday evening, with both sites intermittently going down but neither completely crippled. 4channers on the /b/ board seemed to care far more than Tumblr users (though other 4chan subforums were trundling along as usual), and much of the chaos on /b/ could have been its own users trolling each other. Remember what site we're talking about here.

As these things tend to do, the feud has taken a dark turn. I was browsing /b/ on Sunday night at 10:30 and found the thread featured above, where a user posted the addresses and phone numbers of Tumblr founder David Karp's parents and the Tumblr office, which is the sort of antisocial creepiness that brings 4chan their unsavory reputation.

Nothing serious will probably come of it other than maybe some prank calls and a few pizza deliveries (and a fax!), but who knows. It feels like it's only a matter of time before some weirdo from one of these raids does something stupidly criminal in real life.

If you're unfamiliar with this controversy, I suggest reading my coverage of 4chan's war on Tumblr.

Here's the tl;dr version: Some 4channers got mad at Tumblr because they were trolling the anonymous chat site Omegle. They also feel that Tumblr's been stealing their memes for far too long, and now they've copped 4chan's favorite pasttime, fapping trolling. So 4chan users have decided to show the "hipster teenagers" over at Tumblr who the real trolls are by attempting to bring down Tumblr's servers by flooding the blogging platform with gory photos and creepy porn, and by using software that will automatically overload their servers (less creative, far more effective).

You might be thinking, "Wow, that sounds like a boring nontroversy." I'd have to agree. At least it was at first.

4chan founder Christopher "moot" Poole should be worried at the precedent his unruly users are setting. Poole's worried about his privacy before (friends yelled at a reporter who wrote about his girlfriend), and his contact info must be in many hands now that he's getting media publicity for his new project, canv.as.

For a while on Sunday, 4chan was trending on Twitter, which is quite a feat for the still relatively underground community. And Tumblr users are increasingly agitated and aggressive:



And later Sunday night, I found a post on /b/ promoting a second attack on Wednesday. Maybe these raids would go better if the target couldn't so easily anticipate them. But now that the first raid became such a huge deal for both sites, we'll be watching them more closely.