Pathetic.org was started in 1998 by Gavin M. Roy and grew out of a poetry circle called the Pathetic Poets Society at California State University, Fullerton.
The pathetic.org service runs open source software, including Gentoo Linux, Apache, PHP, and PostgreSQL. Roy intends to open source the PHP software that runs the site, which is currently at version 7.0.
Pathetic.org is free to join, but membership is screened by a membership committee which evaluates, among other things, the quality of a sample submitted poem. Because the focus of the site is on creating a poetry circle online, the emphasis is not on the quantity of members, but rather the quality of members.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump