Talk:Soundboard (computer program)

soundcard

what kind of soundcard do u need to play the soundboard directly to the mic. for example, when doing a prank call. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.139.204.43 (talk) 17:30, 2 February 2007 (UTC).

Please see Stereo Mix. This hardware has been crippled in most modern soundcards and I've edited a bunch of pages about it, but they won't let me edit the RIAA page about it. --Wykypydya (talk) 16:33, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Victim soundboard information

I created the "victim soundboard" information quite a while ago and have updated it recently, which prompted someone to remove the whole thing because it's unsourced. Don't get me wrong, the background information is definitely out there, but I am just writing from my experience with the subject and haven't as of yet taken the time out to cite sources and add references. (This seems to happen with a variety of edits that I make.) Could someone please refine the section by adding credible sources, perhaps from soundboardprankcalls.wikia.com? Just don't deadpool the whole thing because it is not only expository and informative, but useful to victims of prank calls. --Wykypydya (talk) 19:39, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

I placed it below. The burden is on the adder to add sources and make something article-worthy rather than the remover. The stuff below is tangentially related to the purpose of the article at best. 99% of soundboards aren't really used in that format, yet the article made it sounds like that's the only thing you use soundboards for. Wizardman _{Operation Big Bear} 18:27, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

You've got to get on YouTube and search this and you'll see how prevalent it is. Please don't remove entire relevant sections of the article that have been well-established for a long period of time and are correct, just because a recent change pops up for a new section or a certain edit. I would understand if the Vent Harassment section isn't article-worthy, but I think it should be, and the victim soundboard information is pretty relevant and about a widespread phenomenon, and helpful information for the public to know about. --Wykypydya (talk) 02:51, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

If you can find reliable sources that say it's prevalent, then go ahead and include it. Until then, there's not really anything that can convince me it deserves to be in there. Wizardman _{Operation Big Bear} 04:16, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Victim soundboards

Some users create "victim soundboards" from recordings of prank call victims themselves -- often those who were prank-called with a soundboard to begin with and had humorous responses -- in order to impersonate them, and, in turn, people prank-call others with these second-tier soundboards, and so on. This creates second-degree and third-degree victims, etc. This has evolved into a technological form of art if not a science. Often, the targets for repeated prank soundboard calls, and for the eventual creation of victim soundboards, are people who cuss out the prankster or otherwise argue with the soundboard. Each new prank call adds more potential recorded lines of speech to add to the Soundboard Prank Call Community's library with which to harass people. When a soundboard is created of a victim, the victim is considered to have been "turned into" a soundboard. Although many pranksters create victim soundboards of prank calls they created themselves, it is also often possible for third-party users to create victim soundboards from existing prank call recordings that have been posted online, but the effectiveness of this is directly affected by how much the original prankster decides to post; for example, some pranksters protect their victims' privacy by bleeping out the victims' self-identifying information that they say (i.e. their names and locations) from the recordings, which will consequently also prevent any third-party-created soundboards from having these self-identifying lines of speech. Victim soundboards are usually named according to how much information is available about the victim; for example, if the person's name is not known, then a nickname will be devised, i.e. the "Epic Crazy Lady". Also, victims (and their soundboards) are often depicted with images of people who are thought to match the voice (unless a real image of the victim is actually available). The images used to depict them are sometimes of celebrities.

A typical victim-soundboard prank call to another victim who is a "good" target, will typically be a pointless, heated argument and tirade between the victim and the soundboard over who called whom; the calls are highly self-referential. The soundboard of the past victim will accuse the current victim of prank-calling and harassing them, potentially including severe profanity, and the current victim will respond in the same way denying that they made the prank call (which is true until they get turned into a soundboard themselves), and often cussing out in response. It is the naïvete and gullibility of the prank call victims in responding in the way the caller wants and taking the calls seriously, that not only makes them good continued targets, but enables the vicious cycle of creating more and more victim soundboards. Some victim soundboards are created of police officers who answer prank calls in dealing with a recurrent victim's case, as often the pranksters are bold enough to prank them with the soundboards as well, due to prankster's confidence in masking the origin of the call, and/or because the prankster is in another country and believes they cannot or will not be arrested. Using these soundboards amounts to impersonating an officer. Often, the goal when calling victims is to create confusion, such as when an ordinary victim soundboard is used followed by a police-officer soundboard that talks to the victim about prank calls being made, or when multiple soundboards about a certain topic (i.e. alcoholism and AA) are used on a victim.

In the Soundboard Prank Call Community, users gain more perceived merit from making new soundboards out of people. The best way that prank call victims can avoid having their voices posted to the Internet and reused in soundboards, is to simply hang up the telephone and not provide a "juicy" response, until the prankster gives up trying to elicit one. Some individual victims in the United States have gained particular notoriety for the long, ongoing, and well-publicized record of prank calls against them, the extent of the soundboard(s) of them, and the volume of prank calls made from their soundboard(s); they are often referred to as "legends". Many of such targets that become "legends" are small-business owners, because many of them are the only ones to answer their business phone line and do so very reliably (due to the need to conduct business), and they habitually engage the pranksters.

Sometimes, pranksters will use the soundboard of a victim against that person themselves, and the victim often does not recognize their own recorded voice and continues arguing with it and/or will relate to it. In at least one case, a prank call victim ironically attempted to explain the concept of soundboards without realizing he was conversing with a soundboard of himself, and kept relating to the recorded lines about how many prank calls he received.

Fox News aired a story about a series of egregious victim-soundboard prank calls (called "A Nightmare on Burton Street", taken from the name of the movie A Nightmare on Elm Street) made to a particular street in a town in Missouri, which unbenknownst to the reporters, occurred because the victim soundboard had lines making violent references to an address on that street.

Victim-soundboard prank calling often becomes quite creative. For example, in one series of calls, a prankster got a woman to reveal her husband's cell phone number, after which the prankster called each spouse alternatingly with a soundboard of the other spouse that was incrementally built with each call. As another example, sometimes a victim's soundboard will be used to segue into a conference call prank with another victim, in which the real victim (subject of the soundboard) is then connected with that person.

Vent harassment

Oftentimes trolls and hackers who infiltrate unprotected Ventrilo (Vent) server chatrooms use soundboards to harass, confuse, or gaslight the users of the chatroom. A wide variety of soundboards are used for this purpose, and sometimes the troll records the users and quickly creates a victim soundboard (see above) of them, then uses the soundboard against the users, often with humorous results. The victims usually attempt to ban the troll from the chatroom -- to which the troll usually responds by logging back in with different usernames -- or to mute the troll so as not to be disturbed by the harassment. Sometimes the victims attempt to protect the server with a password, but are often helpless to do this or to ban the user, because the administrator of the server is not present, or because they do not know how, or because they are too busy playing multiplayer video games about which they are chatting. (The trolls often deride the victims as "nerds" for their activities and use of Vent to collaborate, although the irony is that the troll is doing something even more useless and antisocial.) Also, muting the troll does not stop the troll from recording their conversation and subsequently posting it on the Web.

Comment from an uninvolved user

Hi; I came here in response to your WP:3O request.

• First things first: Intentionally adding text with a {{citation-needed}} tag is an admission that you don't have a source for the content. This is very difficult to reconcile with WP:V which is surely a (or the) core policy of wikipedia; please try not to do it. If you don't have a source for text that might be challenged, don't add it. Of course, other editors can and should try to improve the article - and right now the improvement it needs most is sources - but if unsourced text gets removed, the person who added it only has themselves to blame.
• On a minor point, at the moment I think the section is a bit overwhelming relative to the rest of the article.
• Finally, I want to thank anyone involved for being civil. When there's a dispute it's all too easy to let tempers fray (and then it's harder to resolve the dispute because people start sniping at each other), but everybody has been polite here, and that's a Very Good Thing. bobrayner (talk) 21:41, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Clean up please

Please clean up this page, its REALLY sloppy —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.173.114.213 (talk) 20:21, 21 April 2011 (UTC)