STP pointed out to me that I was about to hit 10,000 posts, then I forgot, and then I noticed again this morning. So instead of almost wasting my 10,000th post in the Katharine McSkank thread like I almost did, I'll post it here as a thank you to everyone who has helped make VFTW what it is today and who participate in this crazy website. Here is the opus that is the history of VFTW.

This all started out in December of 2003 as a half-joke, half-serious post on the Survivor Sucks message board about how we needed more Juanita Barbers on the show, since she was infinitely entertaining.

Then we decided to test the waters with World Idol, voting for the uber-gay and not uber-talented Alexander Klaws. No dice.

During American Idol 3, the Sucks thread grew larger and we attempted to help people like Jennifer Hudson, Briana Ramirez-Rial, and Lisa Wilson advance with little success. Our first victory came in getting Jon Peter Lewis through in the wildcard round after his classic performance of A Little Less Conversation.

Though we had much less luck with Leah Labelle and Matt Rogers, we soon championed John Stevens, and he became the first VFTW pick to stick for more than a week. He then performed what had been the ultimate VFTW performance (pre-Sanjaya) with Crocodile Rock. The judges were appauled. They called it the worst thing ever.

But John didn't go home that week, nor the week after. Vote for the Worst decided it needed to grow a bit, so a site on Geocities was made. It crashed a lot because it was too popular. Soon John was outlasting the greatly improved Jennifer Hudson. Elton John called it racist, but VFTW knew it was finally gathering some support, albeit small. And VFTW received its first pieces of hate mail on the brand new tagboard.

John Stevens lasted into the top 6, way further than he deserved, and VFTW realized how much fun it could be to mess with the show. When Jasmine Trias cried fake tears on Disco night, VFTW was there to vote as hard as possible.

And the next night, Jasmine outlasted (favorite to win) LaToya London.

It wasn't until the crowd started booing loudly that Jasmine realized only VFTW liked her. More tears came.

The crowd's boos were merely fuel for VFTW's fire. Jasmalien went home in the top 3, and VFTW retired for the season rather than vote for Diana or Fantasia.

When season 4 rolled around, VFTW was ready for action. Dave's friend Griffin had upgraded the site to its own dot com. Debates fueled as to what the site should be called, but Votefortheworst.com seemed simple and it worked. Other suggestions included Votetheworst.com and Votefortheworstidol.com. The site didn't crash any more because it had more bandwidth (though not much, as we'll see later).

The auditions for season 4 promoted some stand-out VFTW picks like Mikalah Gordon and Constantine Maroulis. They were to become the official first picks of the season until this little robot came along:

The first week out, the voting had changed. Instead of voting people IN to the top 12, all Vote for the Worst had to do was make sure their person did not have the least or second least votes of the week. This definitely made things a lot easier. Constantine was the obvious male pick, but on the female side, people were torn with whether to vote for the crazy faces of Mikalah Gordon or the robotic love of Janay Castine. The vote was split the first week, with Worsters not really being able to unite with one cause.

Then came Hit Em Up Style.

It became one of the most beloved VFTW performances in the history of the cause, and we hit up our phones to vote as a united force for Janay and only Janay on the female night. She lasted still ANOTHER week, but sadly didn't make it into the top 12. Constantine and Mikalah did. So VFTW decided to try to help Mikalah, but she only made it to the top 11. For one week, VFTW went back to Constantine Maroulis, until...

Once news got out that Scott Savol had been arrested, we jumped aboard the Scott train right away. Scott survived a few bottom 2 placings with our help, as VFTW was starting to get stronger. When Anwar Robinson was eliminated and Scott Savol stuck around, VFTW made its first ever headlines. But we had no idea what was going to happen the following week.

Scott Savol performed an awful version of Dance With My Father (wish I had the video). Simon told him to pack his bags. America expected Scott to go home the next night, as every time Simon Cowell said anything like that to a contestant, they were usually eliminated. People seemed to listen to Simon.

On results night, Ryan Seacrest announced, "America, what have you done?" We didn't know, but we were itching to find out. The contestants were broken into 2 groups. One group had Vonzell and Anthony. One group had Carrie and Bo. Being that Carrie and Bo were the front runners, they were obviously the highest vote getters. Ryan asked Constantine and Scott to stand in the group they felt like they belonged in. Both picked Carrie's group. Then Ryan announced that one of them had made a mistake... and it was Constantine.

Scott thanked Jesus. And VFTW. Not audibly, but you know, he had to have liked us. Right? Scott was one of the top 3 vote getters of the week. VFTW finally saw real results that had no other explanation than our influence. Then, the events that transpired made it one of the best (if not THE best) night of VFTW television ever.

"Constantine, you're going home tonight."

The camera actually caught Scott laughing as Constantine sang his final song. This was too sweet. One of the front-runners (and former VFTW picks) was eliminated at the hands of VFTW. Paula cried. And cried. And cried while consoling Constantine's mother.

We partied. And partied. VFTW was now in the public's eye. How could it not be after that? But did we have bandwidth to handle our sudden popularity?

At the time, I worked at Bunim/Murray Productions on the television show The Simple Life. I hadn't mentioned my website to anyone I worked with, because I thought (and Deb thought) they might not like it since it was messing with a television show and I worked on a television show. But low and behold, everyone in the office found it. I was sitting at my desk and I heard my coworkers saying "this tag board is awesome!" Millions of sites have tagboards, right? Obviously they had found another. Nope. I peeked around the corner and saw two of my bosses posting on the VFTW tagboard, cracking up that someone posted as Drunken Paula Abdul. I wasn't sure what to do, and 5 minutes later, someone turned the corner and asked, "Dave... is this your website?"

Of course, I said yes, and they told me how much they loved it. Everyone at the company loved it. They thought it was hilarious. So my worries quickly subsided and I was glad I didn't have to hide it anymore. But then new worries came around...

The site went down the following Tuesday, just before the performance show where Scott sang for his supper in the top 5, when I appeared on Access Hollywood.

(I was a little chubby )

Previously, we had maybe 1000 hits a week, and we easily surpassed 200,000 that day. Sadly, the hosting company that Griffin used was shady as hell (I believed they were called Surpass hosting), and they only responded to e-mails. The company literally didn't have a phone. And they weren't responding. For days. Griffin said it was weird because they'd always responded to him so quickly. And thus, Vote for the Worst had its first case of foul play. The site didn't come back up the next day either, and Scott was oddly eliminated after being so popular the week before.

I had no idea what to do. One of my bosses at Bunim/Murray suggested I register Votefortheworst.net at GoDaddy and get back up a basic page and start promoting it. Unfortunately, my idiot roommates at the time had canceled our internet since we were moving in a month. I was furious, but I stayed at work until 11:30 PM registering a new site and working my ass off to get it back up. My parents had also received a call all the way back in Illinois from a company called Hydramedia who told me they were willing to host my site for free if I only ran their ads on it. Previously the site had no ads on it, so it was obvious that I quickly said "yes". The shady company also responded, asking for more money. We paid it for a month and quickly had the domain name transfered over to my name on GoDaddy. We then never talked to that company again. VFTW was back up and running by the end of Scott's elimination week, thanks to Hydramedia, with a banner telling everyone to vote for Anthony Fedorov.

That didn't work. I also received a letter that week from Joe Scavetta, some stupid lawyer from American Idol, telling me I had to take down all media that AI owned off the site. Which I did, because we didn't own it.

He didn't seem like such a jackass, but Joey would later go on to try to sue the guy behind DialIdol and the guy behind IdolGoHome. IdolGoHome guy, Adam Pick, actually contacted me to ask how my website became so famous. He ended up asking for the letter from Joe, pretending that he wanted to see it out of curiosity. He then contacted Joe to pitch his ideas for the Idol website and bragged to me when his site was doing better than VFTW. It became incredibly annoying and I realized he had used me for information. Joe and company told him they weren't interested, stole all of his ideas, and sued him when he tried to keep his IdolGoHome page up with the same stuff. They're now still currently in a lawsuit to this day. Both parties really deserve it. You have to know if you deal with Idol, you're going to get burned.

But then we jumped on the Carrie Underwood bandwagon. The farmbot was a terrible performer, but she was obviously the pimped one to win. So we voted for her to make fun of the producers' favoritism. We started to suspect that the show was rigged at this point because Scott's elimination seemed very fake (that day, a poll showed up on the site that said Anthony was eliminated. It quickly disappeared and Scott went home in the evening). Then, VFTW broke the story that a news article appeared in a British newspaper, calling Carrie Underwood the winner of AI4 before she even sang in the top 2.

Rigged? Probably. VFTW then slightly began to change its purpose. We didn't just vote for the bad singers for fun anymore. Now we were going to help expose the show as a rigged promotional tool and try to do whatever we could to mess with what the producers wanted. Carrie Underwood won regardless of VFTW's effect.

VFTW then decided to tackle Canadian Idol, due to many Canadians who wanted to join in on the fun. We also started our very first non-Sucks board. It was free. It kind of sucked. But it did the job for now. Mike Ross, a Canadian reporter was the driving force behind getting us to start the movement. But soon, he proved he was a gigantic tool. When he didn't agree with our pick, he started insulting the site in his weekly columns, wishing he'd never joined up. But for some reason, he didn't stop writing about us, so we got more publicity. Even though we had no success in the preliminary rounds, we championed Casey LeBlanc in the top 10 with hilarious results.

She soon started outlasting much better singers like Ashley Letaio and Amber Fleury, even though she was performing blandly during songs like Like a Prayer (right click and save that one). Amber even blamed us for her ouster. We were getting some decent press, and we nicknamed Casey "Corpsey LeBland" after her lackluster stage presence. After her gigantic clunker of a performance called I Could Write A Book, complete with the funniest bum note in the history of the show, Corpsey still stuck around. She was finally eliminated in the top 5.

We then picked Suzi Rawn (Snoozi Yawn, who left us with a VFTW rendition of "Can't Help Falling in Love") and Rex Goudie (TrainRex Shoutie, who basically was not very good all season), but didn't produce a winner.

We then prepared for American Idol 5 by signing up for an ezBoard (which is now Yukuized). I asked my good friend Deb to help me administer the site, and she of course told me to fuck off and then smacked me with a ruler. But I liked it, so she decided to jump aboard. The season began with our highest numbers ever in attendance, so we knew good things would come. I started a column called "False Idols" for the site at the urging of my coworkers Channing and Nakia, because they thought I was really funny. And Channing started a column as well "Professor Chan's Grading the Idols". They took off very well.

During the semifinals, we watched out for people we'd like, and one person stood out as soon as we hit Hollywood: Brenna Gethers. We knew she was a kindred spirit for us.

We selected her and Bobby Bennett as our first picks of the season, and Bobby went home, while Brenna acted up for VFTW and the camera.

She was the perfect person for VFTW. She knew that the show was a giant publicity tool and she was milking it for all it was worth. Brenna endeared herself to almost everyone at VFTW and we cheered her on, despite the judges hating her and Simon telling her it was her last chance when she sang Last Dance. Unfortunately for us, it was.

VFTW then moved on to pick Kevin Covais and Kellie Pickler, who both started huge controversies. When we picked Kevin Covais, he suddenly outlasted the more talented Gedeon McKinney and made it into the top 12. We were shocked and amused. He was shocked, and maybe amused.

Kevin then delivered one of the funniest performances ever with Part Time Lover. Headlines quickly started accusing VFTW of helping Kevin, and we were back on the map again. Kevin only lasted until the top 11, as none of our picks could make it over that jump and onto the tour. Joe Lawyer tried contacting me again. First, I got this through GoDaddy:

Joe then ignored my e-mails for the next few days. I got mad because I knew he was probably trying to ignore them so Domains By Proxy would shut my site down when he didn't acknowledge me writing to him. So I wrote to Domains By Proxy, forwarded them the 3 e-mails I'd tried to send Joe, and then wrote another one (CCing Domains by Proxy) saying that this was the last letter I would be sending Joe, and if he didn't respond, I would not be talking to him again after this point. All I got back, finally, was:

Dumbass. And I haven't heard from him since. Besides, Kellie Pickler was waiting in the wings for big things and I didn't have time to deal with fake lawsuits.

When we picked Kellie in the top 16, we also started an expose called The Truth About Kellie Pickler. It was obvious that Kellie was lying about now knowing what calamari was and what a minx was, so we threw together some facts to disprove her stupid act. It worked. The Truth, which showed Kellie in a very revealing prom dress, quickly took over the internet and became the most popular page on the site.

Google searches for Kellie Pickler returned The Truth on the first page. The fraud was exposed, making people angry that she hadn't gone home yet. But we kept voting for her. Her performances were consistently bad, but nothing so awful that people really understood our pick just yet. Though we did get more press. I did my first live interview on MSNBC's Scarborough Country.

Kellie's true Worstness came out with Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered. She butchered it. She knew it. She said it. But she didn't go home.

Kellie then murdered "Unchained Melody" and was sent packing. We then moved on to the spazzy Taylor Hicks, because there were rumors that he was ruffling some feathers behind the scenes and that the producers were changing his songs at the last minute to sabotage him. This ended up being true, and even Nigel Lythgoe admitted that they changed his song. After we picked him, he quickly camped it up with Play that Funky Music and won over the VFTW crowd even more.

Even though we were voting for Taylor, during the final 4, a VFTW victory of sorts occurred when VFTWers noticed that Katharine McPhee and Chris Daughtry were neck and neck at the bottom of DialIdol to go home. Despite my disagreements, many people voted for Katharine that night, and I have to admit, it was genius. The next night:

Chris, you're going home.

More tears. Love it. Taylor then went on to break through an incredibly tiny margin in the top 3, where every contestant had about 33% of the vote. VFTW's votes obviously made the difference that night, and he then bested Katharine to win the entire competition. While Taylor was the favorite to win, nowadays because of his lackluster sales, people blame VFTW for causing his victory. Taylor also refused to sing the coronation song written for him because it sucked so bad, so we had a VFTW victory in him telling the producers to fuck off. Not that Do I Make You Proud was much better, but hey.

At the end of the season, Brenna Gethers also became the first contestant from the show to contact VFTW. After I put tgether a tribute video, her boyfriend contacted me, and let me know that Brenna would be interested in doing an interview at the end of the season. We loved it, and after talking to Brenna and her boyfriend on the phone, I e-mailed her some questions which turned into An Interview With Brenna Gethers. Victory, someone from the show acknowledged us and likes us! Brenna then started posting on the message board, becoming the first contestant to do so as well. Which is why we all love her so much. She still to this day loves and appreciates her VFTW support.

Canadian Idol 4 rolled around and we started on a new forum, the one we have now. Some mailman guy name Dave Rossiter said he'd host it for us for $40 a month. This was much cheaper than the $4000 every 6 months that ezBoard wanted, so we switched.

We didn't have a ton of victories during Canadian Idol 4, and it wasn't a big season for our press. But we had minor victories in helping Chris Labelle last an extra week after he wasn't even supposed to be in the top 22, and helping Brandon Jones make it to the top 9.

Chris Labelle was a money throwing, mohawk wearing Worster at heart, and he soon came by to post at the board as well, the first Canadian Idol contestant to do so. We haven't heard from him recently though.

Eva Avila went on to win the season, and we selected Craig Sharpe, Tyler Lewis, and Chad Doucette to round out the VFTW picks.

As the season was coming to a close, the new forum crashed and went down for 4 days (at this point, it was hosted at vftwforum.com and not a part of votefortheworst.com yet). After the first day, I was pissed, because the mailman Dave didn't seem to be concerned that such a popular site was down. I don't think he grasped the urgency of getting it back up since we had such a loyal following. And while I tried to be understanding, after 2 days, I needed another option, Luckily, our very own MamaSandwich suggested that her husband could help. Enter Nate, aka Snowman, who basically became the savior of the site, making it as great as it is today. I asked him if he could host the board once mailman Dave got it back up, and he said he would. Finally, on the 4th day, the site came back up.

I quickly made a backup copy of everything so I'd have it. I then told mailman Dave that we probably needed to part ways since the board needed a more reliable host. I also offered to pay him a few months hosting to make up for it for all of his work getting everything back up. He flipped out and started acting crazy because he thought I was betraying him after he spent time getting the site up. He locked our site and wouldn't let me make a backup copy, then continued acting like a jackass and started posting on the site as Miskie. I tried to be professional about it, but soon he started posting my personal passwords to the site on the Yuku board and accused me of causing some stupid virus. Of course, he was making all of this up to get attention, and I got really mad. Then I posted exactly what happened in way more detail than I'm sure I can remember now. Everyone at VFTW united against him and he was soon out of the picture. He was a real loser.

Nate then helped redesign the site and it became more blog-like, using php rather than html. Hydramedia couldn't host this, so we then had to start paying really big bucks to keep the site up. Nate united the forum and the site, and made it look as awesome as it does today in time for American Idol 6.

But before the season started, Taylor Hicks fans would cause a real meltdown. The Taylor Hicks thread became a ridiculous mess, with 20 new pages or so every day. It was ridiculous. They even had theme days, such as Cock Tuesday, where they posted pictures of Taylor's crotch area and drooled over it. Seriously. Everyone was annoyed with the crazy obsessed Taylor fans who wouldn't leave the thread alone. As a joke, I filtered the words "Taylor Hicks" and "Taylor" to come out as "Chris Daughtry". This seemed to really piss them off, when it was actually just a joke. They started going crazy, spamming threads with a picture that said "Taylor Hicks, that is all" and complained about how we were Nazis running the board. The mods and I got sick of it, and anyone who was explicitly causing trouble was banned. That was the first big banning at VFTW.

Soon after though, VFTW heroes Killer Bee and Bollox met Taylor and gave him a VFTW shirt. He loved it and even agreed to take a picture with it for our site.

Taylor was the first winner to acknowledge us and the first person to pose for our site. So he holds a special place in our heart, even if the lunatic banned Taylor fans don't. ;)

As American Idol 6 started up, we got everything together to have a great season. Antonella Barba quickly stood out as a potential female pick, and Sundance Head stood out as the best male pick. We ended up voting for both, but Antonella caused the biggest stir when a picture surfaced of her on a toilet.

Sundance tanked on Nights in White Satin, but hr wasn't making headlines like Antonella's picture. It became internet news, and VFTW then was one of the first sites to post even more Antonella pictures.

I even mocked them in a fake news story that still gets tons of hits to this day from horny internet browsers. Antonella stuck around even after some subpar performances.

Soon, the pictures got racier:

And racier:

And VFTW became one of the ten fastest growing sites on the entire internet, according to Alexa.com.

Things seemed silly until pictures of "Antonella" giving a blow job came out. Things didn't seem right, even though every site on the internet had posted the pics, we decided not to out of respect for Antonella. We enjoy spoiling the show, but we weren't out to ruin someone's life. VFTW was then the first website to prove that the pictures were actually of a different girl thanks to an undisclosed source who e-mailed me. Antonella's name was cleared, but both she and Sundance couldn't make it past the top 16 elimination sadly.

During this time, a scandal broke out on the board where some members weren't too fond of Deb for jokingly banning them for a few minutes. I was actually fairly mad about it and had a long talk with Deb, but we're both extremely good friends, and I knew Deb meant no harm. The members didn't seem to get it and constantly complained for a long time. I tried to be nice about it and ignore them, but they decided to start messing up this board with meaningless in-jokes that they had and with stupid flirting all over the place. Can you tell I'm telling this in an unbiased way? ;) During the semifinals, they were given access to the Yuku board archive by some idiot Yuku person named Ransom. They then tarnished the board and decided to delete most of the threads after changing their names and basically ruining it. We then had to ban many members, and there's still a tension about the events to this day. But really, the banned people suck. ;)

VFTW then jumped on the Sanjaya bandwagon, even though we missed Sundance and Antonella. All Sanjaya had done thus far was sing boringly off key, so we weren't that excited. That was, until top 12 night when Sanjaya sang Ain't No Mountain High Enough. Simon was pissed. He gave the standard "Sanjaya won't last" line and expected him to go home the next night. But instead, Sanjaya narrowly escaped the bottom 2 and Brandon Rogers was sent packing. VFTW's votes saved him that night. VFTW then took off AGAIN, with Letterman asking Paula about it and a stupid hunger strike to get Sanjaya out that we mocked for weeks. It all ended up being a lame advertisement for Fitnesssingles.com and not a real hunger strike. Duh.

Sanjaya then gained the support of Howard Stern, which got the ball rolling even further. I guested on Howard's show, and Sanjaya performed the best Idol performance EVER that week with You Really Got Me. Our payapa was finally embracing his VFTWness. That same night, Chris Sligh gave VFTW a shoutout by following smarterthanpickler's instructions and saying "Hi, Dave" on the live show. We were floored. Chris was the man! Sanjaya was the man! We expected to switch to Chris Sligh as our official pick once Sanjaya went home (we didn't see him making it to the tour), but Sanjaya then became the first VFTW pick to make it past the top 11 and into the top 10. Sanjaya then shocked us all with the hilarious ponyhawk during Bathwater. Sanjaya has arrived and he was quickly becoming the best VFTW pick ever.

Chris sadly went home the next week, but Sanjaya mania made the site a true household name. Sanjaya made it all the way to the top 7, and was probably rigged out of the competition. The night before, I appeared on David Letterman and really promoted the site.

Sanjaya suddenly fell into the bottom 2 just before the stupid Idol Gives Head special that the producers didn't want him involved with. So they sent him packing, yet still made mention of him every week.

After realizing Jordin Sparks was the pimped contestant, we tried to get Phil and LaKisha to win, but failed sadly. We then picked Blake Lewis, who shockingly outlasted Melinda Doolittle to make it to the final 2.

Jordin won (as predicted), but Blake still beatboxed his way into 2nd place. We also had fun convincing fantards that Chris Richardson and Blake were gay, since the fantards had already dubbed them the couple "Cake".

The season ended well, and in every news article after the show, Sanjaya was hailed as the true star of the season.

During Canadian Idol 5, we also had a huge influence, with many contestants acknowledging us:

and one certain young country star who became the VFTW record holder by lasting 9 weeks from the top 10 into the top 2.

We also had a funny elimination that rivaled Daughtry/Constantine when Greg Neufeld was booted for the 2nd time in 2 seasons. He whined just like the other losers, he cried, and he generally acted like a poor sport.

And luckily for us, Chris Sligh and Phil Stacey stopped by the board to start posting, becoming the first 2 finalists to post at the board.

Soon after, VFTW started our very own radio show with the help of Darryl from Idol Radio Show. We planned to have tons of guests on, and our first was the wonderful Steffi D from Canadian Idol season 4.

From there, we had Montana Martin Iles, who performed a killer rendition of "Hit Me Baby One More Time", Leslie Hunt, and Trenyce.

Soon though, our guests stopped showing up for the show. Damn them. But we did have plenty of guests stop by. So the show became more topic centered than guest centered.

In the off season, we also took on The Next Great American Band, a terrible show by Fremantle. No one watched, so we became good friends with the awesome Dirty Marmaduke Flute Squad and got our repetitive rockers Light of Doom all the way to 4th place.

Adam, the group's founder, even stopped by our site to substantiate our guesses that Ricky Minor helps arrange music to sabotage contestants and get them off the show.

Around this time as well, Smartie won an online contest from a group of young entrepreneurs who made up a company called MyBowlAd. It was simple: Smartie won, thus she earned a trip to Los Angeles to watch their Superbowl ad being filmed. Though the MyBowlAd guys (Mark Timms, Evan White, and Robert Howie) ended up being scummy businessmen who had no intention of making a commercial, let alone giving her a trip. Thus, MyBowlAdIsAScam.com was born, along with Mark Timms' appearance at the site to defend himself and basically made himself look like an even bigger idiot.

Evan White also showed us his ass.

In getting ready for American Idol 6, we learned the name of the Irish plant from 2 seasons ago that Simon Cowell wanted to win so badly: Carly Hennessy. And when we did our research on her, we found out she had a major record deal and failed miserably. After doing some more research, I put together The Truth About the Contestants of American Idol 7. Michael Johns was a song stealing douche. Robbie Carrico dated Britney Spears. Syesha Mercado was an actress in a Ford ad. And it just kept going. Due to the impressive groundwork, this became the first big scandal of AI7, with just about every major news source talking about the "plants." Some credited us, some stole from us. But either way, we made it happen. And then MTV confronted the producers about it. We were so well known that anything we said at this point was in the producers' faces. Sweet!

The producers also sent us our third cease and desist letter. This time, instead of even bothering to talk to them, we hired a lawyer and had them deal with it. After telling the Fremantle lawyer that most everything we did was covered under Fair Use, we never heard from them again. But of course, they'll be back. They always come back.

The season started slowly, and during the auditions we picked out our standouts: flamboyant Danny Noriega, rocker Amanda Overmyer, and overemotional Josiah Leming. But Josiah was cut just before the top 24, which was a shame, as he had started posting on VFTW. His elimination was incredibly controversial, as he had more talent than half the people who made it through. The night he was cut, he appeared on the VFTW radio show, making us his first post-boot interview. Now that's a VFTW victory!

During the first week of voting, Amanda was praised by the judges, so we voted for both Danny (the obvious pick for the guys) and Amy Davis (by default since she was the worst female singer). Amy went home quickly, but Danny stuck around, even though some people weren't likin' it.

The next week, Amanda was back in rare form by singing "Carry on My Wayward Son" and producing one of the best VFTW performances of the season.

We immediately threw our support to her and continued to vote for Danny even though his "Superstar" was boring-ish. We akso started picking up on the fact that Amanda sang the word "chile" in every song, which made us love her more.

At the time, we started seeing rumors around that David Hernandex was a gay stripper. Due to our excellent detective work, we found these:

and more, placing him at gay nightclub, Burn. I wrote to the owner of Dick's Cabaret, the supposed gay strip club where David stripped. The response from the owner was:

The letter basically told us we were right, and we received a lot of encouragement, so we continued to dig. An Associated Press reporter then called me to ask for comments about the David Hernandez stripper scandal, and I put the owner of Dick's Cabaret in touch with him. Then... we created another scandal. The David Hernandez stripper news became well known, of course with every major news outlet using our pictures, except Perez Hilton, who is a douche and tried out cut out our logo. Because he's a douche.

David stayed on the show, and we were ready for week 3 of the semifinals. Amanda was praised again, but Danny came out and completely embraced his VFTW-ness with "Tainted Love." The leg kicks, head snaps, back talk, and flamboyant attitude won us over, so we voted even harder for him.

But alas, it was not meant to be. Danny went home.

Amanda stuck around in the finals though, to keep singing "chile" and impress us with her overall fun personality and level-headed demeanor. Oh, and she REALLY hated being there during the cheesy group songs. That was pretty funny.

David went home the first week, due to the producers not wanting a stripper on the tour. Amanda made a week further to the top 11, but chile still became one of the most beloved VFTW picks in our history.

Ahh, memories...

Great post Dave!

Aww...I love this site to death

VFTW forever!

This should be mandatory reading for all new worsters who register....it's simply fantastic.

I love this site, it is indeed the greatest joke ever told

I so enjoyed reading this! Thank you Dave!

That was a great idea. Good job, Dave.

Good recap for those of us that were only here since the :fafu season.

Seriously, I still can't believe people ever though Constantine was talented... wtf?

This should be bound and sold.

Seriously, one has to wonder how long until HarperCollins decides to option the VFTW story for publication.

Dave...

That was fantastic. You have explained a lot of the early history and Taylor Hicks saga that I was very unclear on.

You did such a fantastic job, it should be on the front page.

And I loved that the first hatemail is just like what we still see in the mailbag!

Just wonderful.

Dave, thanks for that trip down memory lane. VFTW is such a great place to come after a stressful day at work or school, to chill with people who share the same kind of sense of humor, and to poke fun at the rejects, morons, losers, and occasionally actually talented performers spawned from the Idol gene pool. It's great to share a snarky, bitchy laugh with other posters and to blow off some steam and stress by smacking down our occasional moron trolls. (Sparring with the occasional valued VFTW member is fun, too ) Anyway, at the end of the day this is a great place to come, and I want to thank you, Deb, and all the other posters here (even the ever-charming FAG, without whom my occasional forays here would be far less interesting) for all your hard work!

Wow, thanks Dave, that's the best history of VFTW I've read! Masterful effort there!

But you forgot to mention the new chapter of VFTW - the radio show!

Long live VFTW!

Too bad you can't have Kenny Rogers' Through The Years playing while I read that awesome post.

Dave, I can't believe how much this site has grown. I'm so happy for you. The fun part is that you're going to have to edit the above post many more times in the future as we continue to grow and more awesome things happen for us.

What a great read!

Dave you are awesome. I love this site so glad I joined, made AMerican Idol way more fun. Even though I just joined in March I knew about it and pretty much voted all the picks (except for Picker) This site is huge and hopefully even more people join next year because they seen what the show is really all about so why not make it fun. I spend more time here then I do at Sucks now :smile for VFTW

ETA: Glad you didn't waste your 10000th post in the Kat Mcpee thread that would of been horrible

Congratulations on your 10,000th post, Dave(i have a lot of catching up to do).

I love reliving the memories. What a beautiful post.

Thanks so much Dave! I love this site, I spend way too much time on it. It's like crack, only cheaper, and more satisfying.

Wow. After reading that I feel almost nostalgic.

Dave, you've come a long way baby. Thanks for letting me enjoy the ride.

that was beautiful

As a recent worster, may I say thank you to Dave for posting this great thread. Between this and the archive of past picks, I feel like I've been here a lot longer than I actually have.

This site is one of the most entertaining I've ever come across and I love being a part of it. I can't wait to see what happens this season. And may I add I never thought I would ever say that about AI.

VFTW Rawks!

Very cool review. I only started becoming interested in the site because of the Sanjaya mania, so it's neat to hear the backstory. I finally understand why so many of the top-posting people here got banned. And I'm really, really glad that I missed the whole Cock Tuesday deal.