FilePile, one of the best sites ever for keeping up on cultural events, memes, kittens, and porn, has a thriving online community, but has closed new users accounts for about a year.

Today, a regular user put their spare account up for auction on eBay. This is one of the most relevant, ironic, and interesting cases of grassroots e-commerce I’ve seen all year.

It’s a serious, valid auction, and there are regular filepile users I know who would pay $300 for the accounts they got for free, but the question remains, how much will someone bid for an account on a site they’ve never seen? FilePile has always been a word-of-mouth thing, and since it’s free and the server’s so overloaded, there’s never been an incentive to publicize it.

This’ll be fun to watch.

For the rest of us: I’ve been contemplating a ‘best of FilePile’ secion on Fury, where I’d share some of the gems that come through there…

(note: At posting time, the auction was at $31, starting from $0.01)