About Groxx

Groxx is a service of This is True, Randy Cassingham's weird news publication that's been online since 1994. Ever since True's start, Randy has allowed readers to send him leads on great articles, especially encouraging stories from small town papers that maybe haven't hit the national wire services like AP and Reuters.

The result has been a lot of leads from readers, and many of the stories end up in True. There are a few unfortunate side effects of this system: Randy gets a lot of duplicates, he gets many more story leads than he can possibly use, and no one gets to see the rich variety of stuff that he doesn't have room for. Groxx allows everyone to benefit from the submitted stories, even if they don't make it into This is True.

Site Sections

The site is divided into two main sections: "Most Popular News" and "Recently Submitted". The tabs for that, plus a third area for you to submit your own stories, are shown on top of every page.

The recent submissions have not been reviewed by a moderator (we delete spam as soon as we see it, and ban that user from posting again). This is where the newest items can be found. Registered users (registration is free: join us!) can vote on whether the story is worthy of promotion to the "Most Popular News" section. It won't make it unless it gets enough votes in a short enough time.

Submission Guidelines

Only include "weird news" items from legitimate news sources -- no tabloids like the "National Enquirer", no satire sites like "The Onion", etc. Items should be very recent -- certainly published within the past week at the time of submission.

It's OK if the site requires free registration, but if it requires paid registration, please don't post it. (You might try to find the same story on another site.)

You can either use the headline from the site you're linking to, or write your own. Be as descriptive as possible in the story summary area. It's OK to quote a line or two from the story; sometimes the first line or two isn't the best summary.

Use great keywords, and always start with the location -- U.S. state, or country if outside the U.S. The keyword "idiot" isn't useful; that applies to most of the stories! Be sure also to choose the best category from the list presented.

Finally, be sure to vote on the stories you think are worthy of other readers' attention! (Free registration required to submit stories, and to vote on stories.)

Thanks, and have fun!

Site History

About five years ago Randy came up with a neat site design that allows readers (or anyone else) to register and post links and story descriptions that everyone else can see. It was a multi-tier design with the lowest tier being "just anyone" who could see the posts and follow the links to the "approved" stories, then registered users who could post story links, and finally paid users who would have special privileges, be able to view all the submissions, have significant say over what was "approved", etc. And registered users would have a place to discuss the stories, too. Fun stuff!

But the resulting behemoth would take about a year to program and debug, and would cost between $20,000 and $50,000 (not counting any overruns, which were likely). Randy shelved it.

Meanwhile, several other sites went online with similar designs, the most successful being Digg, which concentrates on technology links. The only thing it lacked was that paid subscriber part, but it's a very democratic system where the users vote on ("digg) the stories they like, which helps push it to the front page -- the more votes, the more people would see it.

Later, a clone of the Digg software was released for public use, called Pligg. Randy has kept tabs on it, and it has grown to a pretty good system. Enoug so that it does nearly everything that the software he mapped out did (except the paid membership part). Randy decided to forget about that (the paid membership part) and use Pligg for this site.

Rather than being supported by a cadre of paid members, it has ads (which, like the ads on all of the rest of Randy's sites, will not flash in your face!)