This photograph is that of a Cape Ground Squirrel in Etosha National Park, Namibia, taken by photographer Kevin Shafer, who at the time worked for the Corbis Corporation, ca. Originally, Fark contained no content except for an image of a squirrel with large testicles. He registered in September 1997, when a friend mentioned that all of the four letter domain names were disappearing. Curtis states that the word "fark" originated either from a chat room euphemism for the word fuck, or from a drunken misspelling, although he tells people it is the former because it is a "better story that way". This is colloquially referred to as the website being " farked" by the community.įark was created in 1999 by Drew Curtis of Lexington, Kentucky. This can generate such an enormous amount of traffic in such a short time that smaller websites thus linked are often rendered inoperable due to congestion or simple server failure. Greenlit links can generate upwards of 300,000 page views in one month for the recipient. Other than sponsored content, links have associated threads where users can comment. Links are submitted by Fark members (collectively referred to as "Farkers"), which admins can approve ("greenlight") for posting on either the main page or one of the subsidiary tab pages. Curtis says the stories are selected without intentional political bias, but that he tries to run both far-left and far-right articles. The site receives many story submissions per day and approximately 100 of them are publicly displayed on the site, spread out over the main page as well as topical tabs that are organized as entertainment, sports, geek, politics and business). Fark is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows members to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites.