GatorAIDS

GatorAIDS is a humor-oriented website with content that focuses on video games, pop culture, and the odds and ends of the Internet and Internet society at large.  It’s an amalgamation of both people with prior experience in the field of humor as well as neophytes coming together to provide their unique insights in the columns of their expertise for the enjoyment of the site’s readers and visitors (who are given the official title of “Gator” in the community). In summary — it’s a humor website for the technically-savvy and/or those who spend a lot of time in front of a screen of some sort. Nerds! Nerds! Nerds!

History
The domain name “gatoraids.com” was purchased in April 2009 and at the time rested in a dormant state for several months. After departing from the creative staff at RFSHQ.com site owner Dracophile (J. Andre Bardin) decided to use the parked dot-com to host sample articles and a portfolio of sorts to include with resumes and job applications. At the time he was a guest editor at a friend’s website so there was no pressing need to maintain GatorAIDS on a regular basis, but when his tenure as guest editor ended he moved his content into his portfolio causing it to grow significantly.

With friends on the sidelines who also wanted to practice writing Dracophile allowed them access to the GatorAIDS WordPress to poke around and get a feel for humor and in the process helped create the website’s first writing staff in 2009. Due to activity, however, and personal matters on Dracophile’s side, GatorAIDS was “closed” to read-only mode for the better part of a year.

In June 2011, after an unceremonious layoff from former employer Miniclip SA, Dracophile re-opened the gates to GatorAIDS and invited disgruntled customers of the A-list game developer to hang out on the newly remodeled forums which featured a similar laid back atmosphere that they were used to. In the process GatorAIDS began to pick up steam once again and presently maintains several thousand page views per day.

The Name
“GatorAIDS” is an obvious play on the American sports drink Gatorade (and for the record we’re not affiliated nor endorsed by Pepsi). It’s origin is that of an inside joke regarding an STD you might catch if you have risky unprotected intercourse with a reptile (fun fact: the actual disease in question is salmonella). The domain name was purchased on a whim due to the sole fact that it had not been claimed by anybody and from there the branding simply exploded with a gator-themed design and iconography. Due to the name being a parody of an existing brand the website formally opened as a humor portal to keep in line with the domain name’s lighthearted intent.