Pointless Waste of Time
, also known as PWoT and later the Cracked forums, was an internet forum on the Cracked server. It was run by webmaster David Wong (Jason Pargin), author of John Dies at the End. Cracked and PwoT merged in 2007, when Pargin was hired as Cracked's Executive Editor. The forums were integrated into Cracked, and thus the most popular comedy site in the world (with one percent of the world in reader base) was born.
The forum had a strict set of rules nobody seemed to bother reading, but were vigorously enforced by volunteer moderators, and was very tolerant of smilies, acronyms and memes. Forum moderators agreed that these things are an essential, new-age component of the English language and should be encouraged in order to further progress world culture. Newbies were encouraged to open with a detailed introductory post filled with plenty of lolcats guaranteed to evoke a positive response from the community.
Wong, along with his friend John Cheese, started PWoT in 1999 as an outlet for their writing. While Cheese focused on pure comedy (in the insane-sociopathic-adventures form), Wong, with less time, decided that he couldn't let his fans wait months for a thousand-word article about fucking a cactus, and produced more insightful material like The Monkeysphere. The PWoT Forums debuted in 2001, the same year as 9/11, which is all the proof you need that PWoT is "a CIA site."
Until its dissolution in early 2020, PWoT maintained one of the highest standards of comedy and intelligent discussion found on the internet, with boards dedicated to casual discussion of movies, TV shows, music, and video games, a heavily moderated board for serious discussion of weighty topics, a contest forum where anyone could submit entries for the weekly "Photoplasty/Pictofacts" image-manipulating contests, and a private Writer's Workshop where members submitted pitches to write articles for publication on the main site.
When Pargin resigned as Executive Editor to write full time, he wiped out the forums except the contest and writing boards, as he would no longer have control over them, but when Cracked changed from articles to social-media-friendly macro images by a small pool of contributors, the remainder followed suit.
Not to be confused with actual pointless wastes of time, nor with A Complete Waste of Time.
