The r/techsupportgore online community has been around for more than a decade. It has its roots in early 2012 when it was first created. Recently, it celebrated its 11th birthday as a subreddit. And in that time, it has grown to immense proportions.

At the time of writing, the sub had nearly 592k members who adore the memes and jokes that surround IT staff members in their day-to-day lives. Namely, wires, wires, and more wires!

The moderator team running the community notes that members will “cringe to the brink of passing out after a few minutes looking at this subreddit.” They add that the group isn’t meant for, you know, actual tech support.

If you need urgent help or some friendly advice, there are other subreddits and places on the internet where you can go. One place that’s very useful is r/techsupport. (Though do actually restart your device and see if that clears any issues up before you reach out to them.)

Meanwhile, r/techsupportgore is about having fun while posting mind-melting pics of tech gone wild. The keyword here is ‘fun.’

Before you start posting every single IT-related pic you’ve found while scrolling your social media feeds, there are a few rules that you have to be aware of. And if you plan on being a long-term member of r/techsupportgore, instead of just passing through, you have to keep them in mind.

For instance, you shouldn’t post photos of devices with cracked screens. They’re incredibly common in real-life and don’t count as ‘gore’ in this context. What’s more, computers coated in dust also usually aren’t ‘bad enough’ to warrant being shared on r/techsupportgore.

Meanwhile, the community also values short-format videos. Namely, you shouldn’t post videos that are longer than 30 seconds. “This is plenty of time to show what needs to be shown,” the mods explain.

While it seems slightly silly (and maybe even magical at times) that restarting your device helps solve some of the issues you’re having, there’s some solid logic hiding behind that. According to ‘Acronyms,’ when there’s an issue with modern computers, it’s usually because one of the programs is struggling or “two conflicting commands” confuse the machine.

So when you turn it off and on again, you’re resetting the device to its initial state. Everything starts over again, completely fresh.

A while ago, redditor u/Coffeechipmunk, one of the moderators running r/techsupportgore, opened up to Bored Panda about the community.

“I feel like the community has grown different tastes for the subreddit over time, for sure. For a while, cable gore was boring, cracked screens, etc. Now? Bad wiring is loved,” they told us during an earlier interview.

According to the mod, the foundations of the sub are built on the idea that the community is meant for sharing “stuff in the tech support or IT field that's a computer comparable version of gore.” So instead of “a heart ripped out, it’s CPU pins.” The mod quipped: “Slightly less awful.”

Redditor u/Coffeechipmunk told Bored Panda that some of the worst cases of tech gore that they’ve seen include devices “with bugs in it” which they think are “the worst.” Among the top worst cases is also “the guy who got a laptop full of milk.”

During another interview, the moderator told Bored Panda that a lot of the content shared by members of the sub “does rather well.” The only exceptions are when people actually try to get real tech support.

Meanwhile, the reason for the subreddit’s continued success is just how fun it is. “In a time where most of the internet can be incredibly serious and most times saddening or angering, r/techsupportgore is fun because you go on it and you can laugh (and/or cringe) at the crazy posts. Where else can you see a post like, ‘Wow, these cables really are messy’ to, ‘A lizard fried my motherboard’ back to back? I love our growing community. They're a bunch of people that just enjoy tech and to some extent, the worst of it,” the moderator said.

We are big fans of the subreddit here at Bored Panda, and we’ve been following its growth over the years. For some more recent features about r/techsupportgore, check out our earlier article here and here, as well as here, here, and here.

Which of these tech disasters made you facepalm the most, Pandas? Have you ever had to deal with anything even remotely similar? Do you work in tech support and have you ever seen something like this with your own two eyes? You can share your opinions and experiences in the comments. And remember: before asking for help, try turning it off and on again!