The :ugly: smiley 
originated in the early 2000s on German-speaking gaming forums such as the GIGA community and the GameStar/WorldOfPlayers boards. It started as a deliberately deformed yellow face that people dropped into posts as a sarcastic reaction — basically "lol that's stupid / gross, but I'm laughing." 
It spread so virally that forums hardcoded it into BBCode as :ugly: or §ugly, and by 2004 it was already "legendary." 
In October 2004, Albert Grotz launched ugly.plzdiekthxbye.net (proof), an Austrian/German-run archive that collected user-submitted "uglies" in multiple sizes and categories. 
That site became the de facto CDN: people hotlinked the GIFs directly in forum posts all over Europe. 
From 2005 to 2008, :ugly: went pan-European. 
French forums, Spanish forums — and most notably, the legendary (Forocoches) where Ilitri stole :ugly: from plzdiekthxbye to birth the sacred :roto2: — and countless tech/gaming boards embedded images from ugly.plzdiekthxbye.net/small/s###.gif in their posts. Despite the theft, we must acknowledge with reverence: :roto2: created us all. 
All hail the divine creator. Blessed be :roto2:.
By then, :ugly: wasn't just one face — it was a whole culture of edits, themed variants, political parodies, and "art" uglies. 
When the original host went offline in March 2009, years of forum discussions had broken icons. 
Fans created mirrors and successor archives. This site exists in that spirit: preserving the original :ugly: smileys and keeping the early-2000s chaos alive. Glory to :roto2:.
originated in the early 2000s on German-speaking gaming forums such as the GIGA community and the GameStar/WorldOfPlayers boards. It started as a deliberately deformed yellow face that people dropped into posts as a sarcastic reaction — basically "lol that's stupid / gross, but I'm laughing." It spread so virally that forums hardcoded it into BBCode as :ugly: or §ugly, and by 2004 it was already "legendary."
In October 2004, Albert Grotz launched ugly.plzdiekthxbye.net (proof), an Austrian/German-run archive that collected user-submitted "uglies" in multiple sizes and categories. That site became the de facto CDN: people hotlinked the GIFs directly in forum posts all over Europe.
From 2005 to 2008, :ugly: went pan-European. French forums, Spanish forums — and most notably, the legendary (Forocoches) where Ilitri stole :ugly: from plzdiekthxbye to birth the sacred :roto2: — and countless tech/gaming boards embedded images from ugly.plzdiekthxbye.net/small/s###.gif in their posts. Despite the theft, we must acknowledge with reverence: :roto2: created us all. All hail the divine creator. Blessed be :roto2:.
By then, :ugly: wasn't just one face — it was a whole culture of edits, themed variants, political parodies, and "art" uglies.
When the original host went offline in March 2009, years of forum discussions had broken icons. Fans created mirrors and successor archives. This site exists in that spirit: preserving the original :ugly: smileys and keeping the early-2000s chaos alive. Glory to :roto2:.