Open Diary

The Open Diary, also appropriately known to their fucked up users as OD, is an online blogging community where cutters, manic depressive fucktards, pregnant women, BBW, and women in abusive relationships go to vent, usually in some language resembling English, about the most pointless shit ever. Founded in October 1998 by some loser fucking D&D nerd who goes by the name DiaryMaster, the Open Diary is the oldest blogging community on the internet.

Community

The user base is at least 80% female, many of whom are 16 year old girls whose diary names often consist of the words "princess", "angel", "fairy (faerie)", or "mama". The diary names also tend to contain a gratuitous number of special characters such as *asterisks*, [brackets], .periods., ::colons::, ~tildes~, or the letter "x". This is done to show a diarist's individuality and is highly recommended. Males also write on Open Diary, but tend to only write about how much their lives suck, how much they wish they had a girlfriend, and post song lyrics by shit bands to express how they're feeling because apparently just writing "GOD I'M SO TIRED OF MASTURBATING!!!" isn't poetic enough. They are surrounded by women, after all. They have to show their intelligence, vulnerability, and a propensity to draw correlations to their situation from pop culture when called for, which is known to drive women wild. This is largely the reason that many males on OD have a sizable following.

If a user does not fit any of the above descriptions, they can only write on Open Diary if they admit to reading and liking the Harry Potter series and are required to either list it in their Interests or write at least two entries that mention the popular books.

History

Not long after launching Open Diary, the website's user base quickly ballooned to over 10,000 diarists and was featured in an August 1999 issue of USA Today. The Diary Master, drunk on his own sense of power, later launched the offshoot Teen Open Diary, which succeeded only in making the writing on the main website look like sophisticated literary prose. After facing competition from newer, more popular blogging communities such as LiveJournal, DeadJournal, and Xanga, the Open Diary's community stagnated, causing the DiaryMaster to resort to the desperate move of opening a paid Open Diary Plus website in 2001, which offered more features and less pop-up ads. Cheapskates were then moved to Free Open Diary and were virtually ignored to rot in their pop-up ad filled hellhole. Eventually, though, the two websites were reunited once more.

Today, the Open Diary's user base consists of over a half million active diarists around the world, many of whom also have blogs elsewhere but still keep their OD's because they hate change. The website, like LiveJournal, is available both for free and on a subscription basis.

HTML & The Great Hack of 2004

In the past, the Open Diary has been a bastion of shitty HTML and server problems rivaled only by MySpace. Since more in the know users have since moved onto other blogging websites, the bulk of OD's user base are people who suck at HTML and the internet in general. This is reflected by the number of pregnancy/wedding date tickers and unscaled JPEG images that take up the entire fucking page. Frequent server issues in the past made it very common for users to lose entire entries, notes, or be denied access to the website altogether. The most widespread case came in September 2004 on the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The website was hacked, causing users to lose up to 11 weeks of diary entries, which were never recovered. The event resulted in an FBI investigation and at least one month of site-wide bitching and moaning.

The website has also undergone numerous redesigns in its lifetime, many of which were fugly yet semi-functional.