Andrew Badr

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Andrew Badr, Admin or ~Andrew is the creator, founder and acting Head Admin of YWOT since 2009. He created the website in 2009 as a social project, and has kept it maintained over the years with infrequent updates.

Aside from Your World of Text, Andrew has been involved in numerous other projects(Ex.the YWOT-inspired Jotleaf). His website can be found here.

General Information[edit | edit source]

Andrew Badr created the website on August 2nd, 2009, and has been occasionally active since.

Andrew has been mostly inactive since (at least) 2020, with many users speculating that he was driven off by the excess of offensive content on YWOT. He has however made several major updates to YWOT since then, including one that made the site work better on mobile devices.

On at least one occasion, Andrew Badr has been known to bring in freelancers to deal with the site's problems.

Andrew owns three pages that we know of: /~andrew(the mainpage), /~andrew/wotd and possibly /~Help. He occasionally updates each. He also owns a YourWorldOfText Twitter account which is occasionally updated to include updates, bugs and community notifications.

Activity on YWOT[edit | edit source]

Spawn Box Changes[edit | edit source]

Andrew Badr used to make regular changes to the Spawn Box. On their user world, /~fp has kept an archive of every iteration of the box since May 2nd, 2015.[1]

  • May 2nd, 2015
    May 2nd, 2015
  • May 3rd, 2015
    May 3rd, 2015
  • May 3rd, 2015
    May 3rd, 2015
  • May 4th, 2015
    May 4th, 2015
  • May 4th, 2015
    May 4th, 2015
  • May 6th, 2015
    May 6th, 2015
  • May 7th, 2015
    May 7th, 2015
  • May 8th, 2015
    May 8th, 2015
  • May 9th, 2015
    May 9th, 2015
  • June 23rd, 2015
    June 23rd, 2015
  • June 27th, 2015
    June 27th, 2015
  • June 29th, 2015
    June 29th, 2015
  • July 19th, 2020
    July 19th, 2020
  • August 10th, 2020(Mainpage Lockdown)
    August 10th, 2020(Mainpage Lockdown)
  • January 6th, 2021(Mainpage Reopens)
    January 6th, 2021(Mainpage Reopens)

World of the Day[edit | edit source]

Andrew Badr used to regularly feature different userpages on the Spawn Box. This ended after the 2020 Lockdown, with the last WotD being /~yougotsharked/.

An incomplete list of past WotDs can be found at /~andrew/wotd.

yourworldoftext.com/~andrew/wotd

Cult or Just Weird[edit | edit source]

In 2020, Andrew Badr was interviewed by the hosts of the Cult or Just Weird podcast.[2]

Updates to YWOT[edit | edit source]

Creation of YWOT[edit | edit source]

"I launched Your World of Text about a year ago with an announcement on Hacker News. It jumped immediately from HN to 4chan, and out from there. For the next few days, I could track when it reached different countries by what language appeared most on the front page. The reception was very encouraging. I've seen a lot of creativity and beauty on the site; some day that might be another post." —Andrew Badr, Open Sourcing Your World of Text[3]

Andrew Badr registered YWOT as a domain on August 2nd, 2009[4] and would announce its creation at Hacker News on August 4th.[5] YWOT was then advertised at r/programming on August 9th and Chrome Experiments on August 25th. [4] These posts drew a decent amount of attention, but a greater boost to YWOT's popularity would come soon after when the site gained popularity on 4chan.[6]

List of Updates[edit | edit source]

Much of YWOT's early updates are documented on the YWOT History Github, as well as on the official YWOT Twitter which is run by Andrew Badr himself.

Below is a list of notable updates, mainly from 2009 - 2014:

  • August 27th, 2009: User accounts tested in beta.yourworldoftext.com.[4] [7]
  • September 22nd, 2009: Editing is disabled in preparation for "the move to a new system."[7]
  • September 23rd, 2009: Site transferred from App Engine to Andrew's own server. [7]
    • Mainpage reset in the process. Archive to be made available at a later date.
  • September 23rd, 2009: All beta subpages are moved to yourworloftext.com/beta/[worldname].[4][7]
  • October 30th, 2009: Memory leak is fixed, made scrolling faster.[4]
  • October 30th, 2009: Archive of the original mainpage(before September 23rd) is now viewable at http://www.yourworldoftext.com/frontpage/1.[8] [7]
  • November 4th, 2009: Twitter feed added to every page.[4]
  • November 5th, 2009: Users can now invite members to their userpages.[4]
  • November 6th, 2009: Added coordinates to the menu.[9]
  • November 12th, 2009: Owners of userpages can now create owner-only tiles.[10]
  • November 26th, 2009: Announcing the claiming of 5,000 subworlds.[11]
    • At the time users created userpages by claiming regular subworlds.
  • December 2nd, 2009: Implementation of the "go to coordinates" feature in userpages.[12]
  • December 10th, 2009: Gave world owners the ability to create links to coordinates in their userpages.[13]
  • February 8th, 2010: Gave world owners the ability to create links to URLs in their userpages.[14]
  • June 8th, 2010: Creation of the first version of Our World of Text, a copy of YWOT with more features(Ex. pasting, teleporting).[15]
  • July 25th, 2010: YWOT is now open-source.[16]
  • September 9th, 2010: Allowed users to reset their passwords.[17]
  • November 21st, 2011: Users can now unclaim their userpages.[18]
  • December 13th, 2011: Added option for world owners to create member-only and public tiles in their userpages.[19]
  • April 15th, 2011: Users can now paste on their own userpages.[20]
  • April 18th, 2011: Users can now customize background/text colors on their userpages.[21]
  • June 26th, 2011: Userpage owners can now customize cursor colors as well as colors for different types of tiles.[22]
  • February 10th, 2013: Userpage owners can now enable members to create member-only tiles.[23]
  • July 8th, 2013: Users can no longer claim subpages, but can now create userpages with a "~" in front of their names.[24]
  • April 13th, 2014: Change to URLs.[25]
  • July 15th, 2015: Announced the 2015 Mainpage Wipe.[26]
  • July 17th, 2015: Announcement that 3 billion characters have been typed on YWOT.[27]
  • December 3rd, 2015: Users can now see the amount of visits on their pages.[28]
  • February 16th, 2016: Users can now clear all public tiles on their pages.[29]
  • October 13th, 2016: YWOT now works properly on Safari and Mobile Safari.[30]
  • August 15th, 2017: YWOT now works on Android.[31]
  • December 14th, 2017: Added scrolling momentum.[32]
    • Page now moves slightly after you stop scrolling(as opposed to stopping as soon as you finish scrolling).
    • Used to be an option in the menu but now seems to be active by default.
  • May 27th, 2021: YWOT now runs a lot faster on mobile.[33]


"Down for an update, be back within a couple of hours."


YWOT has historically been taken down for a variety of reasons.

  • July 8th, 2013: Site is taken down for a few hours.[34] [35]
  • February 2nd, 2014: YWOT is temporarily taken down due to a DDoS attack.[36]
  • May 13th, 2014: YWOT is taken down for maintenance, returned the following day.[37] [38]
  • December 8th, 2014: YWOT is taken down for upgrades, returned the same day. [39] [40]
    • Transfered to a faster server.
  • September 6th, 2016: YWOT is taken down a few minutes for server upgrades.[41]
  • January 14th, 2018: YWOT is temporarily taken down for service upgrades. Brought back the same day.[42]

Anti-Spam Effort[edit | edit source]

Before the 2015 Wipe, Andrew seemed to play an active role in combatting spammers and griefers. To this end he has been known to IP ban prolific spammers[43] while also updating the site to block out scripts. Andrew has also taken more drastic actions to fight spam, such as closing the entire Mainpage in 2012[44] and 2020.

Christmas Lockdown[edit | edit source]

On December 21st, 2012 Andrew Badr locked the mainpage and made almost all tiles uneditable.[44] It was explained that this was a measure to deter spammers and that the mainpage will reopen a matter of time.

Users refer to this period as the "Christmas/Holiday Lockdown" as well as the "Apocalypse/Rapture" due to it happening on the year of the Mayan doomsday.

Screenshot of the Christmas Lockdown featured on the YWOT History Github

The only users allowed to edit the mainpage at the time were Infraraven and a small coalition of Mormons who made ASCII art around spawn.

Snapshot of the Christmas Lockdown from /jerryrapture

Badr reopened the mainpage on December 23rd, and today /~JerryStarfield/jerryrapture preserves a snapshot of spawn during the lockdown.

Summer of 2015[edit | edit source]

The excess of spamming scripts seemed to have reached its peak in what many veteran users now call "The Summer of 2015." It is unclear what exactly happened during this period, but the 2015 archive shows spam(most prominently a sea of exclamation marks) extending 350 coordinates in all directions; almost all landmarks during this era were regularly targeted by griefers.

  • /~Dzeni(Leader of the ASG) talks about the Summer of 2015
    /~Dzeni(Leader of the ASG) talks about the Summer of 2015

The Summer of 2015 culminated in July 15th, when Andrew cleared all text from the mainpage. The YWOT Twitter account cited this as "a fresh start."[26] Due to a lack of documentation, it is unclear whether the 2015 Wipe was successful at deterring scripters.

YWOT Twitter announcing the 2015 Wipe(July 15th, 2015)

2020 Lockdown[edit | edit source]

Andrew Badr locked the mainpage on August 10th, 2020 in reaction to severe racism at spawn.

In August of 2020, YWOT was featured in a video by a popular Brazilian YouTuber. The resulting influx of Brazilian users drove the largely English-speaking userbase into a frenzy, causing them to flood Spam Central with massive amounts of racist spam.

Posted on the unofficial discord by Infraraven.

This excessive display of racism ultimately caused Andrew to lock the mainpage on August 10th, 2020.

This action would not be reversed until January 6th, 2021, when Andrew reopened the mainpage at the request of two longtime users: Infraraven(a developer for Our World of Pixels and possibly an admin of YWOT) and kkb(a renowned ASCII artist).

2021 Update[edit | edit source]

Andrew Badr joining the Unofficial Discord(May 19th, 2021)

On May 19th, 2021, Andrew Badr joined the Unofficial YWOT Server as the user andrew#3688, asking for ideas on how to combat spam.

It was at first unclear whether this was the real Andrew, but on July 27th, 2021, andrew#3688 returned to announce that the beta test for a new YWOT frontend was available at stage.yourworldoftext.com.

July 27th, 2021
  • Snapshot of stage.yourworldoftext.com(August 3rd, 2021)
    Snapshot of stage.yourworldoftext.com(August 3rd, 2021)
  • August 3rd, 2021
    August 3rd, 2021
  • August 16th, 2021
    August 16th, 2021

Stage.yourworldoftext.com was an alternate version of YWOT that was rendered in canvas instead of HTML. According to /~fp, users before this point were scrolling the entire world whenever they moved around an YWOT page, with the site hiding its scrollbars.

Canvas rendering(along with other potential updates) enabled smoother scrolling and faster loading along with the option to save all on-screen text as an image. These features were added to base YWOT on August 17th, 2021, after which stage.yourworldoftext.com would be taken offline.

Explanation of the 2021 update by /~fp.

The August 2021 update presumably included additional protection against paste scripts, as seen by the drastic decrease in spam after the update rolled out.

Lag Intervention[edit | edit source]

From March/April 2024 to July 2024, YWOT experienced an abnormal amount of lag which did not subside. The cause of this remains unclear, but the most popular explanation is that a single griefer was continuously making a large amount of requests, causing the server to place a rate limit on all users.

The Janitor's explanation for the lag(June 19th, 2024)

Multiple users reached out to Andrew throughout June to notify him of the lag. Andrew would later respond, saying that an update will come soon. He did explicitly state, however, that someone other than him was in charge of fixing the issue. FP later confirmed that Andrew had contracted a freelancer to work on the codebase.

  • Andrew Badr responding to the user Mandrake(June 17th, 2024)
    Andrew Badr responding to the user Mandrake(June 17th, 2024)
  • Responding to RedtheAnimator, announcing that an update will come soon(June 20th, 2024)
    Responding to RedtheAnimator, announcing that an update will come soon(June 20th, 2024)

The persistent lag ended on July 1st, 2024. It is unknown what measures were used to put an end to the issue.

Response to Noman(July 2nd, 2024)

Jotleaf[edit | edit source]

Original Jotleaf Home Screen(October 12th, 2012)
Updated Jotleaf Home Screen(March 4th, 2013)

Jotleaf was a website published by Andrew Badr in 2012.[45] It enabled users to create infinite webpages similar to YWOT, except in this case users could also upload images, videos and sound files.[46][47]

For a time, Jotleaf was advertised on the Spawn Box at Spam Central.

fornowband.org

Jotleaf was taken down sometime in 2015, presumably due to the high cost of running the site.[48] Today, its only remnant comes from fornowband.org, a link on Andrew Badr's website which matches many descriptions of Jotleaf.

(What is presumably) Jotleaf's source code can be found here.

  • Snapshot of www.jotleaf.com/WoahDude/woahdude/ (August 10th, 2013)
    Snapshot of www.jotleaf.com/WoahDude/woahdude/ (August 10th, 2013)
  • www.jotleaf.com/meowstic/big-fucking-furrie/ (November 2nd, 2015)
    www.jotleaf.com/meowstic/big-fucking-furrie/ (November 2nd, 2015)
  • Jotleaf world settings
    Jotleaf world settings

Trivia[edit | edit source]

  • Andrew Badr was the first user to ever join on YWOT.
  • Andrew Badr was the first user with a registered account on YWOT.
  • Andrew Badr created the first subpage on YWOT.
  • As YWOT does not receive donations or placed advertisements. He endorses the website completely out of his own money.
  • Andrew Badr can potentially track every edit made on YWOT. He had once been seen "rewinding time" on the mainpage

References[edit | edit source]

  1. ↑ https://www.yourworldoftext.com/~fp
  2. ↑ https://cultorjustweird.libsyn.com/s2e7-the-line
  3. ↑ https://andrewbadr.com/log/3/open-sourcing-your-world-of-text/
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 https://github.com/ywothistory/ywothistory.github.io/blob/master/_posts/2012-12-31-earlyywot.markdown
  5. ↑ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=742268
  6. ↑ https://andrewbadr.com/log/3/open-sourcing-your-world-of-text/
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 https://www.andrewbadr.com/yourworld/
  8. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/5281656020
  9. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/5490922621
  10. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/5662050307
  11. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/6105923899
  12. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/6293382586
  13. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/6541226891
  14. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/8827676592
  15. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/15743326242
  16. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/19534190723
  17. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/24076468060
  18. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/138753740743262208
  19. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/146700666629390336
  20. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/191626450766528512
  21. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/192685550782783489
  22. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/217756128052920321
  23. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/300674149561536514
  24. ↑ https://github.com/ywothistory/ywothistory.github.io/blob/master/_posts/2012-12-30-modernages.markdown
  25. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/455398455033462785
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/621526512232173568
  27. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/622249745684107264
  28. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/672473591074680832
  29. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/699735476144627712
  30. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/786661681489408000
  31. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/897549739419291649
  32. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/941383830728007681
  33. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/1397993877118803974
  34. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/354305794294026243
  35. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/354455584864612352
  36. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/430068968171126785
  37. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/466367533571141632
  38. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/466696507174158336
  39. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/542011120899211264
  40. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/542134916998115329
  41. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/773138053015699457
  42. ↑ https://x.com/yourworldoftext/status/952697745437061121
  43. ↑ https://www.yourworldoftext.com/~akumetsu/an_offer
  44. ↑ 44.0 44.1 https://github.com/ywothistory/ywothistory.github.io/blob/master/_posts/2012-12-30-modernages.markdown
  45. ↑ https://x.com/Jotleaf/status/248562106557952000
  46. ↑ https://gcdi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2013/03/05/meet-the-toolmakers/
  47. ↑ https://www.facebook.com/jotleaf/posts/pfbid0PSeeFBcZoK6MdKgimip8H5ZQTEkF3u3odefprUDbKhEVj8Gwqhre4mxBtZjnwDZBl
  48. ↑ https://x.com/Jotleaf/status/662345164279689216
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