MountainX.com gets farked!

If you hang around on the internet long enough, it’s only a matter of time until you’ll come across the wildly popular online community at Fark.com. The site is a hybrid of an offbeat-news aggregator and message board, and is visited by millions of readers each month. Links suggested by their readers, known as “farkers,” who tend to be a few days ahead of the mainstream news. This means that when a link to a news story is picked up by Fark, it’s not only being seen by hundreds of thousands of readers, but it’s also far more likely to become a national story that gets picked up by blogs, other news aggregators and (not infrequently) mainstream media outlets. It’s kind of a big deal—at least as things on the internet go.

In fact, this sudden rush of traffic can slow down—or even completely crash—many sites, a phenomenon known as “farking” (or, if you’re being technical, “unintentional denial-of-service attack”).

If you’ve been wondering why MountainX.com has been so slow since yesterday afternoon—you guessed it—we’ve been farked. It’s kind of cool, actually.

Xpress news reporter David Forbes’s recent blog post about the Kuhn family’s brush with Buncombe County sheriff’s deputies over their upside-down American flag has sparked the interest of farkers all over the world. To see what they think of the situation, check out their comments here. To leave your own comment about the Xpress getting farked, please write them in the field below.

—Steve Shanafelt, A&E editor