The BBC story:

The Big Brother beauty contest

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but a new website has taken networking to Darwinian extremes by banning ugly people.

Beautifulpeople.net is an online club which admits only the most beautiful people – through a vicious selection process.

Applicants enter a profile and picture, which sit on the site for 72 hours. Fully signed up members – opposite sex only – are then invited to vote on the applicants’ attractiveness.

Most people don’t make it any further. Since launching in April, the UK site has been contacted by 30,000 hopefuls. Only one in 15 have got through. Given the site is a thinly veiled singles club, this is dating eugenics.

“Being accepted on to the site is the beauty equivalent of entering in to Mensa,” claims Greg Hodge, the marketing director. But he rejects suggestions that he is promoting an unrealistic view of beauty. Yes, it’s elitist – but that’s what people want, he says. And every avenue in life discriminates against some in favour of others.

“All we do is give an accurate representation of what society’s ideal of beauty is. You are voted in by your own peers.”

…etc; like thousands of other people I decided to go check it out – not to submit my photo, of course, that’d be pointless – and I was astounded to learn that Beautiful People only use Internet Explorer:

You are currently using version: Netscape 5.0

To be able to use BeautifulPeople you need to update to a newer version of Internet Explorer.

BeautifulPeople operates on Internet Explorer Version 5.5 and newer.

It is free and completely without risk to update your browser and it can be done automatically by clicking here:

If you do not wish to update your browser but would like to continue even though BeautifulPeople will not work as is intended, click here:

…and if you launch it regardless, it promptly turns into a mess of ugly tables and failed javascript.

A lessons for geeks everywhere: we may be ugly, but we 0wn beautiful peoples’ ability to achieve anything at all…