A number of RYS readers approached Cal about keeping that page alive, but he did not want the name to continue. Fab Sun (aka Fabio Sunshine, I'm not shitting you) got the nod, and CollegeMisery.com started on June 24th, 2010.
What differs the most between the pages is that comments are turned on at CM, allowing us to flail madly, get off track, insult each other, and (more than occasionally) raise the roof on good ideas.
A number of conceits exist with the community, some that come from RYS, and some that are all our own.
- The blog is run at a "compound" somewhere. In the RYS days, it was a desert location, filled with ravenous wolves, barbed wire, tar pits, and townie redheads. CM started in a shed on the campus of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, moved for a time to Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, where the large cache of compound guns caused less suspicion, and then after the hiatus of 2014, relocated at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa. In March of 2015 the community took their weed, guns, leathers, and canned meats to Oilmont, Montana. In December 2015 they relocated to a non-descript strip mall site in Orlando, Florida.
- There has always been a hookah, but past RYS "personality" Compound Cash was likely to steal your weed.
- The page is dying. It is always dying. We are always teetering on extinction, and we like it.
- Everything on here was written by 4 people. We are lonely. We have cats instead of families. We hit refresh all day to inflate our page counts. We made millions on the ads, when we had them, and then took that money, invested it, and now have spent it on trash.
- The graphics suck.
- The moderators are always fucking things up, changing fonts, blurring images, capriciously picking and choosing who gets to have a voice. Fab used to get hammered for being too big a dick swinger, and then the next day for being too much of a woman. Leslie K would occasionally generate lustful love letters and then misogynistic rants. She treated them all the same, just like she does her hubby, daughter, and son-in-law, with disdain. Terry P. had at least 2 recognized nervous breakdowns during office hours. The moniker "RGM," or Real Goddamned Moderator gets used occasionally to depersonalize the position. Hiram ran the page one day, and you can guess how that went. After the 2014 hiatus Terry P. took over again and ended his tenure in mid March 2015 with the remarkable "Mediocre Reveal." Both Ben and Kimmie ran alternate pages during CM hiatuses.
- Compound Cal has been the head counselor to the page. He has been responsible for shitty graphics for years. He occasionally posted vidshizzles (videos) that he cobbled together from trolling YouTube for silly college student shenanigans. He also started the trend of making the page as ugly as possible. When readers complained, he fucked it up more.
- There was Yaro. Read this. Or this. Or this. Or this.
- There have been some trolls who like to fuck with us. One in particular wanted to shut down because of the damage we were doing to the academy. He was a dick. Multiple trolls told us that we barred them because they're "telling the truth."
- The boys who ran the page had a big thing for Yvonne Strahovski. (Some of the girls, too.)
- Thirstys are questions. The Big Thirsty started on Thursdays, the big Thursday question.There were rules about Thirstys, and lots of wiseasses like to tweak the poor moderator by making up new ones, or posting a Big Thirsty on a day other than Thursday. That shit's not right. Cal, when he finished his round of golf, wrote the moderator long, torturous emails.
- There was a fruitful but then disastrous alpaca business.
- There was Katie.
- There was a duck. The duck was popularized in CM lore by Terry P. It was often evoked to change the topic, defuse a tense situation, or because it was such a good looking fucking duck.
- People write the moderator of the page to complain. All. The. Fucking. Time. When the moderator can not take anymore, he/she put up "Real Goddamned Mail," a favorite feature of the page. It was supposed to make the perpetrators feel bad, and over time the complaints got fewer, and the animosity - we imagine - was turned internal.
- Everyone drinks.
- We solve all the problems of academe, and then we break them and start again.