Racist Anon Incident

## Belligerents

* **Blast**
* **Crimson Blitz**
* **Legownz**

**\* Timberwoof**

* Dr. Dos
* Innocent Anons†

* **The Racist Anon**†
* Teaquin†

**The Racist Anon** was an event on TF2Tags wherein the site was accosted by the incident's namesake; an anonymous shitposter whose schtick was spamming racist, inflammatory posts. While this event was essentially similar to every other time the site has had to deal with shitposters, this particular instance was notable due to its length (three entire weeks) and Timberwoof being permabanned early on during the event (in a case of mistaken identity). It was largely the final straw that prompted Dr. Dos to disable anonymous submissions for good.

## The Racist Anon's Debut (May 1st - May 2nd)

On May 1st of 2015, several Anonymous submissions were posted on the site that were largely understood as purposefully bad and purposefully inflammatory. These submissions had a severe case of caps lock, generously used the word "fuck", and explicitly targeted both the Anon's own mother and the mothers of everyone else. Naturally, people responded with obvious criticisms of the Anon's mental maturity and their originality. The one who appeared most offended by these tags was Blast, who mocked the Anon in three separate tags in rapid succession with characteristically fiery passion. This tirade against the not-yet-racist Anon drew some concerns from users like Sqwid, who thought he was getting worked up over nothing, and thus Blast made a post apologizing for going overboard while at the same time establishing his point: such Anons have no place on TF2Tags.

Following Blast's initial speaking out against the Anon, the Anon would then evolve into the Racist Anon, as they shortly thereafter began making tags of similar inflammatory quality as before, with a racial twist. At some point, they also apparently made a series of Kurt Cobain's Microphone jokes that were equally disliked. Crimson Blitz stood out immediately as a primary adversary of the Racist Anon, and would continuously report their tags for deletion, which Dr. Dos more often than not granted. Crimson would continuously do this throughout the month. Alongside Blast, other taggers would go on to mock the Anon for being an attention whore, while a couple Anons asked what all the fuss was about. Among the former was a minor tagger named Timberwoof, an IRL friend of Blast's, who made a tag pretending to be the Racist Anon. This tag was a pistol named "The Ni- Oh shit, I forgot to sign out!" as an obvious joke about the situation, which was quickly dismissed as being just a joke in the comments. This tag would shortly prove to have been very unwise to make.

## Justice for Timberwoof (May 3rd - May 14th)

On the morning of May 3rd, it was revealed to the site that Timberwoof had been indefinitely banned from TF2Tags for reasons that were not disclosed. However, the popular (and accepted) theory was put forth by Blast, who reported his friend's ban to the rest of the site: the pistol tag from the previous day. It is thought that Dos saw all the tags getting reported, deleted them all, and after seeing Timberwoof's tag (either by coincidence or perhaps a malicious attempt by the Racist Anon to deflect guilt) believed him to be the one behind these tags, and thus banned him. Blast and Crimson both immediately vouched for Timberwoof, who clearly did nothing wrong, and requested his immediate unbanning. These pleas were not met, however, for at the time it appeared that Timberwoof's banning did the trick, in Dos's eyes.

However, the Racist Anon was not yet defeated, and returned a day and a half later to post more racial tirades of nuclear magnitude. After Ulysses insulted the Anon in typical Ulysses fashion, Blast and Crimson would begin to raise awareness for what happened to Timberwoof in hopes of getting enough popular support to change Dr. Dos's mind, in which Six Pixel Kid and MexicanDeadpool joined.

Over the next few days, the Racist Anon continued declaring their hate for the blacks and the mothers. At this point, other Anons were growing concerned that the actions of this particular Anon would spell doom for the site as they knew it. One Anon parodied A Fucking Idiot (assuming this wasn't AFI himself, that is) in their mocking of the Racist Anon. Meanwhile, Blast continued to raise support for Timberwoof in whatever way he could manage, while also adding Timberwoof into Sensible Haircut's contest. He would go on to thank everyone for showing his friend so much support. Meanwhile, Crimson stuck to his role as the resident TF2Tags policeman, reporting tags wherever and whenever he could. However, due to the sheer amount that was coming in, he began to suspect that the Racist Anon might be more than one person.

On May 7th, the Anon would once again return and make more of their trash. At this point, this Anon had been doing this for a full week, and people were starting to get angered at the situation. Innocent Anons began to insult and wish death upon the Racist Anon for giving them all bad reputations. CP grew extremely tired of hearing about the Anon nonstop and told everyone to just shut up, while Legownz began to wonder if it was even worth keeping the anonymous tagging feature around at all at this point.

That same day, Timberwoof was able to return to the site anonymously while at school, since the IP address was different from his home's. He thanked the community for showing so much support. Legownz, who had recently jumped upon the Timberwoof Train, would criticize Dr. Dos at the end of the next day for being so deafeningly silent regarding the Timberwoof situation, agreeing with Relk that it was getting ridiculous, a critique which Crimson also agreed with.

Dr. Dos would make a rare tag on the 10th, which was unrelated to both the Racist Anon and Timberwoof. Taking advantage of this rare moment of on-site activity, Six Pixel Kid and Legownz alerted Dos of the situation regarding Timberwoof, and later would comment on Legownz's post from the eighth. He stated that there was an automatic ban for usage of slurs that lasted for 24 hours, and if Timberwoof was not unbanned after that point, he should add Dos on Steam to talk about it. This response, while fundamentally misunderstanding the situation at hand, was positively received and led to Timberwoof adding and speaking with Dos about his ban. Later that night, Timberwoof's ban was lifted, which Ulysses announced to the site. For the next few days, people would welcome Timberwoof back with great joy, with many such as Relk\_Cehi, Legownz, and Flam welcoming Timberwoof back, while Blast informed the Racist Anon that they were now Timberwoof's bitch.

## Continued Chaos (May 16th - May 18th)

Following Timberwoof's return, there was a two day period of quiet where things appeared to calm down, with the Racist Anon being nowhere to be seen. This optimistic hope that the situation was over would come crashing down on the 16th, when the Racist Anon would return once again to go on another one of their shitposting sprees. This particular spree would be the Anon's most pervasive and widespread, to the point where more and more taggers were unable to ignore the situation. It was also revealed that the Racist Anon *was* actually banned for a few days, which explains the quiet period, but for some reason was unbanned. This prompted a vitriolic response from Minor Tagger Captain Sum Ting Wong, as well as an increased number of taggers advocating not to respond at all, as attention is all the Anon wanted.

The next day began with more chaos, though it was not caused by the Racist Anon. This involved a tagger that had so little tags that calling him minor would be too generous, named Teaquin. Teaquin had posted 6 tags previous to this date between the dates of March 31st and May 1st of 2015. On May 17th, Teaquin posted two additional tags simultaneously, which would become his worst and best tag, respectively. On the worst tag, Teaquin got lambasted by Sensible Haircut for complaining about Machina bodyshots, insulted him, and left a miss rating on the tag. Following this encounter, all of Teaquin's posts would mysteriously be lowered to -101 points each, bar his best tag which remained at 45 crits. Also, Teaquin missbombed Legownz of all people for hundreds of points, for reasons that remain unknown to this day. Teaquin would disappear from the site after this incident, leaving people completely and utterly confused and introducing onto the site the most dangerous weapon available to everyone in the missbomb. At some point, the -101 scores would be undone, leaving the tags with their proper scores.

Following the Teaquin incident, the Racist Anon returned and did more of his usual nonsense. During this time, morale on the site began to fall to all-time lows, and people began to take on emo personas and names to reflect their pessimism, much to Sensible Haircut's dismay. On the 18th, the Anon returned with more garbage, after evading another ban through what is understood to have been achieved through a VPN. The Anon had also began to regularly start attacking the gays in addition to the blacks and the mothers. With the combined surge of the Racist Anon's work, the low morale, the previous day's Teaquin incident, and the advent of some other low-quality taggers, people began to believe the site was figuratively and literally going to hell. Community veterans such as Sensible and a returning Relk encouraged people to just ignore it and move on. An Anon under the name of Charles Darling would create a set to tell people how to deal with the Racist Anon:

> "Ignore the anon. Don't comment on his stuff, don't make posts about him, don't even rate his stuff. If he's completely ignored, He'll likely get bored and leave. Of course, he's probably going to see this and stick around for a while to spite it, but hopefully he'll eventually get bored and leave if we do that."
>
>

Danjin, Master of Skelenomics agreed wholeheartedly, stating that the only way to win is to not play. However, paranoia had began to grow among the taggers. Relk and Crimson dismissed this advice because it came from an Anon, questioning whether this was someone of good faith or the Racist Anon attempting to trick them. Another Anon suggested banning IPs to make banning them actually effective, but again, taggers including Legownz, Player 1 + Player 2, and Beelzebuzz did not take it too seriously because the advice came from an Anon.

Following this, Legownz would make a tag expressing how fed up he had become with the Racist Anon, and asked Dos that the only potential solution was to disable the anonymous feature altogether. The Anon would respond to this tag with a tag of their own, proclaiming "Fuck you!" Not long after this, the anger that had been building up in Blast over the previous two and a half weeks finally came to a head, and he exploded. Immediately after, Sensible made a tag expressing how he felt he was the only one not bothered by the Racist Anon whatsoever:

> "I mean think about it, a guy sitting at his pc writing stupid things genuinely doesn't bother me considering all other evil things happening in this world. And I've seen far more offensive things than what he can write in a few tags, his work is middle school level and if middle school level insults is the worst he can do then I honestly couldn't care. What I do care about is Blast and everyone making a big hub-bub about it and making others perceive this is tantamount to the holocaust. It isn't."
>
>
>

Danjin would wholeheartedly agree with this statement, venting his own frustrations in a reply to the above comment:

> "I don't know how many times it has to be said. The only way to combat the anon is to ignore the anon. I'm more bothered by the anon being consistently fed than the anon himself. It just gums up the works even more with mediocre tags taking place of his tags. I refuse to discuss this outside of the comments. It's a waste."
>
>

## Exodus (May 18th - May 20th)

Following Sensible's expression of his frustrations, he would go on to be even further disappointed in what happened next that day: taggers began to leave the site over the Racist Anon. A comment on a tag from MexicanDeadpool verified that Sensible believed the leavers to be babies. An Anon also agreed to this, and called all the leavers a bunch of babies for leaving. However, these tags would not stop more people from leaving later.

The 19th would begin with MexicanDeadpool echoing Sensible and Danjin's advice about ignoring the Anon, which again was mostly just preaching to a choir. The Anon would continue to make posts that were swiftly reported and deleted by Dr. Dos. Later that day, however, Flam, who had previously stated that he did not care about the Racist Anon and merely focused on the good tags, revealed that he was going to Leave and Never Come Back over the Racist Anon flame war, stating that the site had broken him "mentally and emotionally". This was the largest tagger to leave at the time, which garnered a response from iSyphun, who stated that just because other people left, doesn't mean he had to as well. As more people began to leave, taggers such as Beelzebuzz, Captain Sum Ting Wong, and Forbidden Light made messages of encouragement to the taggers, stating that they will carry on and that the Anon will eventually be defeated. Timberwoof would also give a message to the community, asking if they were really going to let one asshole ruin all that they had built on TF2Tags, and that doing so would make his unbanning for nothing. However, Timberwoof would soon join the exodus himself, stating that all his inspiration came from the people who were leaving, and without them he had no reason to stay. In reality, however, he did not leave. CP, as a sort of inverse of Flam, would then make his own message of encouragement to the community that they will persevere and get through it. Crimson, who had been on the front lines of combating these tags since the very beginning, stated that he just wanted to get back to making tags again. Ulysses responded to this supposed "New Age" stating that just because people have left doesn't mean they will be gone forever.

Not long after Ulysses's warning, an Anon made a post with the Schadenfreude taunt, laughing and stating "That guy must be so pissed!" While unconfirmed, this was likely a celebration at the Racist Anon getting banned once again. Meanwhile, the site had began to calm down, with MexicanDeadpool thanking Sensible and others'... well, *sensible* advice that calmed everyone down, including frontline fighters Crimson and Blast. The site had entered a calm state once again, but all knew that it would not last, for the Racist Anon would sure rear their ugly ahead once more.

## Decisive Action (May 21st)

The following day opened remaining calm, much to everyone's pleasant surprise. Some time passed, and the site temporarily broke for a time. When it returned to its normal state, Dr. Dos made a tag about the situation. Using a Rainblower titled "Spy Check Mode", Dos announced that Anonymous submissions had been disabled (while also taking responsibility for breaking the site by forgetting to upload a file). Immediate celebration ensued in the comments of this tag and in tags following this, for the three weeks of chaos had finally come to and end. The light at the end of the tunnel had been reached. Ulysses pretended to be an Anon by renaming himself to a generic TF2 name, but nobody was fooled. Others cheered for a more mild reason: no more forgetting to login before making a genius tag! The rest of the day was spent in celebration and a return to normalcy.

## Aftermath (May 22nd - May 23rd)

The following days continued the celebration of the Racist Anon's defeat, but there were some important consequences of disabling the Anonymous feature. Due to the feature being disabled, seemingly for good, many Taggers who had spent their time on the site almost entirely Anonymously emerged from the shadow of anonymity. Legownz gave some advice to these new taggers, stating that if they make a bad post, they can always delete it to boos their score and profile rank.

Taggers who had left during the exodus also began to return to the site, including Flam, though he was a bit unconfident that this would be the end of such flame wars, with the Racist Anon being but the first in a potential cycle. To his credit, he was absolutely correct.

Otherwise, people would continue to make jokes at the Racist Anon's expense for awhile, but eventually everybody moved on.

## Re-enabling of Anonymous and Legacy

Curiously, Dr. Dos re-enabled the anonymous feature later that year on June 10th. Nobody knows why he did this. People were largely wary of this, due to fears of people abusing the feature again, which appeared to be starting up again once more. However, on June 12th, merely two days later, Dr. Dos disabled the anonymous feature once again, for good this time. The feature would not be re-enabled again for the remaining three and a half years of TF2Tags's lifespan.

The destruction of Anonymous had far-reaching effects on TF2Tags. Up until that point, it had been a staple feature of the site, and was originally the only way to make tags at all in the beginning. At the time of its permanent disabling, 70% of all tags created were Anonymous; by the Tagpocalypse, that proportion would shrink to only 6%. Anonymous voting would continue for another year or so, but would eventually be disabled as well.

The disabling of Anonymous also had unexpected consequences upon the new TF2Tags community. Many taggers had been on the site for awhile at that point, but nobody knew about them due to them posting only under Anonymous. TGRobert is perhaps the most effective example, for he had been Anonymously tagging since February of 2015. And as anyone who knows TGR and others like him, the disabling of Anonymous forced everyone to attach a username to their tags and comments, which meant that when people desired to air their grievances with the site direction, specific users, or whatever, they had to do so knowing that people knew *they* were the ones who said it. This meant that Flam was correct; the Racist Anon was but the first in a series of many, *many* shitstorms that would take place in the coming years of TF2Tags, with other Anonymous villains that caused chaos on the site, such as the Shitposter of 2016 and Endiome.

It is also important not to understate the effect of Teaquin, a seemingly unrelated but nonetheless belligerent actor. Though Teaquin was originally thought to have created the practice of missbombing, the claim is put in doubt due to Legownz's usage of the term and the fact that it is unlikely no missbombs occurred in the prior four years. However, Teaquin's seemingly random targeting of Legownz can be considered the first modern missbomb, particularly the first modern Grudge Bomb, which would be a source of major contention in many other future shitstorms.

## Who was the Racist Anon?

To this day, nobody knows, and as such the Racist Anon remains the only "villain" of TF2Tags that successfully "got away with it" so to speak, for nobody has any idea who they could have been. This was, in part, due to no serious effort being made by anyone to discover the Anon's identity, but also because there really was no way to do it. Dos had not yet implemented tag log IDs that made it easier for people to know who was voting what on which tags. They could have very well been a tagger, but it is equally likely it was a random troll looking cause chaos, in which they succeeded. It could even be as Crimson postulated, that the Racist Anon was in fact the Racist Anon**s**. Thus, the Racist Anon remains just that: the one Racist Anon that ruined everything for the other Anons.

## Trivia

* The Racist Anon was given several different representative items by the community to address them. The most commonly used (and therefor the one most accepted) is the Mildly Disturbing Halloween Mask, though others have used the Spook Specs or ghost items painted black.
* During this incident, a number of trends, memes, and other events transpired:
	+ A meme occurred, with sets making jokes using the "Roses are red, Violets are blue" poem.
	+ Sensible Haircut held a contest.
	+ People became Emos.
	+ Relk returned to the site after experiencing a creative hiatus.
	+ Most notably, Teaquin.
* The Racist Anon Incident is what distinguished several taggers as major taggers for the first time, most notably Blast and Crimson Blitz, who both reached 1000 crits during the incident and were among the most vocal opponents of the Racist Anon.
* During this incident, the tagger known as MexicanDeadpool experienced a skyrocket in relevance and popularity, showing extreme enthusiasm for the site, its community, and its lore. He was the one who suggested, in the midst of all this, that a TF2Tags wiki be made, which led to the creation of the first wiki by Legownz, and later this wiki by Timberwoof. However, MexicanDeadpool would later leave the community before truly becoming immersed in it.