2004 · in memoriam · 2015
fkn0wned
welcome to the cheat scene
“We're a community before a leecher central.”
Archive actively growing — more pages recovered every hour
“We're a community before a leecher central.”
For about eleven years there was a forum where a few hundred thousand people learned to break things. It started as a Counter-Strike 1.6 hack site in 2004, grew into one of the largest gaming-hack communities on the internet, briefly became front-page tech news, and then — like every forum eventually does — went quiet, expired, and got parked by a domain squatter.
This is a memorial. Everything below was rebuilt from what the Wayback Machine managed to save.
Board statistics as recorded on the final healthy snapshot of fkn0wned.net, January 8, 2015.
Every era rebranded itself. Taken from the actual page titles, year by year:
“Welcome to the Cheat Scene!” 2008 – 2011
“[Insert motto here]” November 2011 — someone forgot to finish the config
“Welcome to the underground” 2012
“THE NEW GENERATION” 2013, on the banner at the top of this page
The tags mattered. [Founder], [Owner], [FkN] for crew, [VIP] for the paying members, [1K] once you cleared a thousand posts. A 2013 staff post jokes about “the Pink, Green, Orange and Blue master race” — the staff name colors.
As it stood on September 2, 2011 — the shape of the place at full strength:
Site Related — Site News · Minor Updates · Comments and Suggestions
General — General Discussion · Introduce Yourself · World News · Support · Serious Discussion · Entertainment Discussion · Competitions (Caption This)
General Leechers Galore — Public Giveaways · Tutorials · Monetizing
The Market Place — Seller's Lounge · Black Market · Buyers Section
Gaming — PC Gaming · Console Gaming
Cheat Archive — Download Database · Tools · Maplestory · Counter-Strike · Call of Duty · Blizzard Games · Battlefield Franchise · Other games · Detected Cheats
Computer Security and Hacking — Discussion · Programming · Security Tools · Hacking Tutorials
Art and Design — GFX Basement · GFX Resources · GFX Battles · GFX Tutorials · Graphics Competitions
Red Light District — Software · Movies · TV Shows · Music · Games · E-Books · Warez Request
Porn Paradise — because of course
The GFX Battles board — open battles, voting, results — is the one people always remember. Half the community was teenagers who got genuinely good at Photoshop arguing about renders and C4Ds, on a website ostensibly about aimbots.
Served exactly as the crawler found it — the skin, the avatars, the post counts, the signatures. Nothing cleaned up.
The original home. Captured 2004–2013, through the pre-Rebirth boom, the wipe, and the Steam-hack era.
Enter the .com forum →The New Generation. Captured 2013–2015 — the last chapter, right up to the final good snapshot.
Enter the .net forum →This memorial is a work in progress, and it is growing. Pages are still coming down from the Internet Archive as you read this — tens of thousands of threads, and they land on the site the moment they arrive. Come back and there will be more of it than there was.
Beyond the Wayback Machine, we're combing the rest of the internet for whatever else survived: mirrors, caches, old screenshots, saved threads, forum backups, anything anyone kept. The goal is the most complete memorial to fkn0wned that can still be assembled.
If you have something — a database dump, an archived thread, screenshots, the old skin files, or just a memory worth writing down — it belongs here. Nothing is too small. Half of what a place like this was never made it into a crawler.
There's a Discord for the memorial — for anyone who was there, anyone trying to find people they used to know, and anyone with something worth adding to the archive. Old members, old staff, lurkers, rivals. Come say you were there.
Join the fkn0wned DiscordSubmissions, corrections, and “you got this bit wrong” all welcome.