USENET newsgroup created in
1987 by
Brad Templeton to help control the stem of
bad humor out on the
Net. You see,
bad content was even a problem back then. r.h.f was (and still is) a
moderated newsgroup--Brad served as
moderator for a number of years (until 1991 or 2), then
Maddi Hausmann-Sojourner for a few years (a time often considered
contentious by many
r.h.f watchers, and since 1995 has been in the very capable hands of
Jim Griffiths, with Brad Templeton as "executive moderator."
Back in the old days, they use to print annual jokebooks. They're quite the collector's items.
Nowadays, the newgroup has one or two jokes a day of usually very high quality. I think it's a critical Internet rite of passage to actually get a joke accepted into rec.humor.funny. RHF's editorial policy will include tasteless, offensive, or otherwise off-color jokes, the only determination is the moderator's opinion of it being funny enough (which means a lot of offensive humor doesn't make it simply because most of it really isn't all that funny.) Particularly offiensive jokes will be rot13 encoded (Really bad ones will be double rot 13 encoded.)
The entire output of r.h.f is available at http://www.netfunny.com.