Totse (TOT' see / TAWT' see, from the acronym for "Temple of the Screaming Electron"), is a bay area BBS started by Jeff Hunter, aka "Taipan Enigma", in 1989 (a founding member of NIRVANAnet™) as a dial-up BBS named "& the Temple of the Screaming Electron".

Totse became available on the World Wide Web in 1997, and in the spring of 1998 the dial-up BBS system was discontinued. Totse is home to a vibrant message forum, and is reputed to host the world's largest collection of text files.

Totse.com has a strong commitment to free speech, as can be seen in the diversity and occasionally unsavory nature of its articles, the fact that BBS members can post essentially anything as long as they do not become "trolls", and most especially that the first paragraph seen upon opening the Totse.com main page is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. There are some exceptions to the free speech rule: Goatse, Lemonparty, Outwar (a game where points are earned for number of times a link has been clicked), and, for a short time, the word "nigger" was banned due to spamming.

There are 34 individual forums on the Totse.com community bulletin board with, according to the site, more than 31337 registered users (this number was taken from a thread posted by cense, moderator of the network security and hacking forum, in which he displayed a screenshot of the registered users count, significant because of the phrase 1337 or 31337- meaning "leet" or "elite") and a staff of 5 administrators and 54 moderators (as of June 2005).

Among the many people in TOTSE there are the moderators who people will usually get into constant arguments with. However, there are moderators who usually don't get into arguements with the users at TOTSE. The reason for complications is when a moderator goes power crazy and decides to abuse the users by deleting threads, posts, and even editing posts. Sometimes there will rightful moderators but will give a cruel and unusual punishment when a they decide to alter someone's post. The typical moderator alteration will happen when a user creates an interesting argument in a thread recieving attention from other users when at the end of a post they will give a Tinyurl link redirecting people to a picture of burngirl, goatse, tubgirl, and many other miscellaneous pictures that are meant to disturb users by showing pornography or other disturbing webpages, images, soundfiles, videos, etc..

see: [link] for example.

There are many moderators who do their job of course, and then there are those moderators who turn wicked and power crazy. The many of moderators, also known to many as Snoopy, will of course start deleting threads that don't seem to fit in that BBS board, even though they do. For instance, "Should the Cookie Crisp cereal mascot have changed?" is a decently created thread and topic because of that stated idea towards 9/11 changing the ideas of corporations that showing a crook and a cop going at each other isn't exactly what we need after post-9/11 attacks. However, the moderator will be ignorant to this claim and move the thread into Food Glorious Food instead of keeping it in Spurious Generalities. Basically you have your intelligent moderators, and your semi-intelligent/ignorant moderators.

Not only will moderators argue with people over threads but they will also sometimes ban people from the chat for very little reason. TOTSE has it's own chatroom which is connected to irc's chat network slashnet.

TOTSE is seen by many as a place to dwindle your time talking about idiotic things that make a little bit of sense. However the case, there are many people in TOTSE who are very intelligent. Many of these people can be found in the boards:

• Network Security and Hacking
• DIY (Do It Yourself)
• Laboratory Tips
• Cunning Linguists
• Mad Scientists

These are just a few of the boards that have a lot of discussion about science, not to forget Backyard Ballistics of course which includes talk about pyrotechnic devices and fireworks.

For many other the other boards on TOTSE, a few which are constantly spanned for no reason, there are people who usually dwindle their time talking about idiotic things. The most common of these known boards among TOTSE users are Half Baked and Spurious Generalities.

To veterans of TOTSE, users who have had time over four months of time on TOTSE, these people have seen the many changes of TOTSE, including the destruction of spurious generalities which has been flooded with trolls who constantly spam it with topics that should be in Half Baked or elsewhere such as I Found it on the Web.

In the TOTSE BBS you will find the occasional murder/suicide or too long didn't read posts and replies. TOTSE claims that they had created the idea murder/suicde thread along with:

"I would use an emo kid to...".

• If zombies were attacking the world, I would use an emo kid to sing a sad song and make them cry tears which would lead to their effects of self mutilation and later suicide.

TOTSE users also have a habit of trying to out-smart each other in certain boards of the forum with silly antics and phrases from movies or songs. Most slang and witty discussions are based from current pop culture, media, history or other forms of information that people can create a witty reply from that was actually part of history.

Many internet forums will see TOTSE BBS as a place where the "kewls" hang out. Not known on many places on the internet, a "kewl" is a person who supposedly takes into acts of mayhem by blowing things up or creating other destructive things that are simply noobish.

When in fact, there are TOTSE users that could create electrical robots that shoot out bursts of flame with the press of a button on a remote control, while it speaks in Japanese saying, "WATASHI GA BAKA DESU!" chasing people. Which actually takes knowledge in electronics, robotics, pyrotechnics, organic chemistry, polyvinylchloride materials, and not to forget wireless technology.

There are many types of people on TOTSE:

• Programmers
• Auto-Mechanics
• Chemists
• Computer Technicians
• Linguists
• Physicists
• Researchers
• Mathematicians
• Botanists
• Musicians

and the list keeps going...

Many people go to other forums to discuss such matters as chemistry while TOTSE is a place that revolves around ideas such as the mathematic formulas a person could use to figure out the number of combinations to use from a combination tumbler master lock once its lugs hit each other and turn. In other words, people can talk about physics and mathematics to discuss security engineering. Not only will people talk about security engineering, but also other broad topics of science such as electro-chemistry.

In many other forums, such talk is disallowed because many will see it as criminal activity, when in fact people are just discussing security engineering in search for higher educational learning. This is why the first amendment is on TOTSE's front page. People have the right to discuss anything that doesn't seem right or isn't allowed at other forums so they may discuss things for higher education.

Other talks of discussion would be taking off materials from a vehicle so that they could enhance the speed of a car, which is illegal in many places. However, just because someone is discussing it doesn't necessarily mean they are going to commit this act of crime and their discussion is only used for higher education.

There are many type of people at TOTSE who will talk about many various things at lots of different levels.

From security engineering, automotive manipulation, pyrotechnics, homework help, and the list keeps going...

TOTSE is a place where freedom of speech is not voided at any cost. However, there are those times when TOTSE seems to get a bit shakey because of elistest/stalkers who decide to shake things up on purpose. Many people agree that there is a freedom of speech on TOTSE, however there are also rules that no one really discusses which leads to many members getting upset at the TOTSE staff.

The users who decided to create trouble usually are punished with an [Internet_Protocol|internet protocol] ban and a username posting block.

Of these people are:

• Kamisama (a.k.a) Kamisama_Reborn

This person was known for stalking moderators activities online at TOTSE and seeing how their powers could conflict with each other's. They also abused the power of administrator's / moderator's banning people by an incident that happened in half baked.

This incident started when someone decided to create a webpage to show others how they could create thread titles that stretched out a page. When people use a certain type of BBS Forum code, this code will stretch out the page's width so that a scroll bar must be used to see the rest of the topic. Not only will the pages be a lot wider, but loading time for these pages will take a lot longer.

From what is known, Kamisama noticed this webpage was being spoken about in Half Baked and decided to let people take course in spamming half baked with thread topics that only stretch the page uncomforting many people to continue in their half baked topic discussion. This webpage was in no way part of TOTSE.com that allowed users to spam half baked and other various places. This gave Kamisama a chance to report the webpage and people in half baked of letting through to a security engineering breach because Kamisama assumed this webpage was a social engineering tactic used to gather TOTSE.com user passwords. When Kamisama reported this in Spurious Generalities titled to the Administrators it recieved attention and led to the ban of many users of TOTSE. This led to over 10-15+ users who were banned. During this time registration was also locked so that no one could reregister, this upset a lot of TOTSE users and also when determined Kamisama started the coming uproar, led to the ban of Kamisama.

There are many people who have actually gotten into trouble with law enforcement. Whether or not totse.com had any influence on how they were caught by law enforcement, they are still seen as heroes.

• Warweed12

This user was seemingly caught up for having pipe bomb materials, flash powder, along with some other misc. items on their person while being caught by law enforcement. They had done nothing wrong, they were just caught for some odd reason. Warweed12 has said that they were wearing a TOTSE.com hat while being caught.

His girlfriend was on TOTSE.com telling everyone that he had been caught be law enforcement officials and was sitting in jail needing bail assistance. For what Totse members were told, bail had been denied to him and was eventually given. People donated money to help with bail and also with lawyer assistance. Eventually warweed12 came out and everyone was like yay for a very very short time. However, warweed12 was not allowed to post on the internet and has the same probation and rules to this very moment.

• totse.com (aliases: totse.org, totse.net)
• Zok's Website!
• Location for a Picture of Jeff Hunter.
• NIRVANAnet™