Portal of Evil
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Portal of Evil (POE) is a web directory co-founded by Chet Faliszek (of Old Man Murray) and K. Thor Jensen, and based in the Seattle area (formerly Cleveland, Ohio). Portal of Evil can be considered a spinoff of Chet's earlier site, Old Man Murray, as many of the staff members and early forum posters migrated from Old Man Murray's forums. Unlike more general web directories such as Yahoo! or Google Directory, POE specializes in unusual, insane, and otherwise interesting websites. The site also provides popular discussion forums, for users to discuss the listed sites.
The term evil in the site's name is somewhat of a comic exaggeration, as the listed sites mostly comprise the uncommon sexual fetishes, paranoid conspiracy theories, general eccentricity (e.g. Time Cube), teenage angst, and otherwise normal sites with exceedingly bad web design. Sites are nominated for inclusion by readers and selected by a team of editors, sometimes with the help of a preliminary vote open to all users.
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Portal of Evil provides a forum for each website listed, as well as extra forums for general discussion. Forumgoers are given loose reins: as long as a thread begins on-topic, posters are generally free to move on to other topics or flame other posters. The largest flamewars tend to occur when a site's webmaster or users discover their site's listing and, offended by the comments, begin posting in its defense.
Webmasters of listed sites often do not discover that they have been listed. This is due to the restriction placed on Portal of Evil users, informally dubbed the "Prime Directive" or "PD", which states that users of the site may not contact or communicate with the owners of listed sites in any way with the single exception of PoE's own hosted forums, under threat of banning. The reason for the Prime Directive is that any contact with the site in question could irrevocably alter it and perhaps cause it to disappear from the web altogether, denying future readers of the Portal their enjoyment.
