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Portal Of EvilPortal of Evil is a humor website, co-founded by Chet Faliszek and K. Thor Jensen based in Cleveland, Ohio. The core and central idea of the site is its function as a web directory that, unlike general directories such as Yahoo or Google Directory, specifies in sites that would be considered highly unusual, strange, and "evil". The site also provides highly-frequented discussion forums, which are home to sometimes flippant and always frank and uncensored discussion of the listed sites. Portal of Evil can be considered a spinoff of an earlier site, Old Man Murray, as it is administered, supported, and frequented by many common individuals. The term evil is a bit of a misnomer. While some of the listed sites would be probably be regarded as 'evil' by the average internet user, such as the infamous God Hates Fags website, the majority of sites are listed for unusual but harmless content. Themes often found in listed sites include unusual 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 via a voting process and a team of editors. Occasionally, the site administrators publish "Rejected Sites", billed as "Sites Too Bad for Even POE". These are usually content-poor sites nominated repeatedly, sites nominated by their owners hoping for free publicity, or bad jokes. Portal of Evil provides a forum for each listed site, as well as extra forums for general discussion. Most sites only garner a few comments; however, others will generate flamewars and other heated discussion that can drag on for months or years and accumulate thousands of posts. This usually happens if the webmaster of the site discovers that his or her site has been listed and comes to the forums to object, sometimes with threats of legal action. When this occurs, the site owner is nearly always heavily mocked. Particularly memorable forum posters and site members in the history of the Portal of Evil often have separate web presences which they attained prior to or because of association with the Portal of Evil. Examples of these internet personalities include Tiesel Haxan/JSP, Seanbaby, TEDA, Noisia, Jewboy, Smoove K, and Superfister69. Webmasters of listed sites do not always discover their listing. This is because of the primary operating principle of Portal of Evil, informally dubbed the "Prime Directive" or "PD". It states in no uncertain terms that users of the site are not to attempt to contact or harass the owners of listed sites and not to try to effect any change to them 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. In this way, Portal of Evil is like a museum of the strange parts of the web, unlike similar sites such as Something Awful, which sometimes encourage their users to annoy the owners of unusual websites. Portal of Evil has spawned several related sites. POE News is a news site that links to unusual news stories from media outlets across the globe, like a somewhat liberal-leaning Drudge Report. POE News also features busy discussion forums, in its case one for each news item. Bidboy follows on the general theme, pointing to unusual and exotic auctions on eBay. Recent additions to POE News include user forums, allowing registered users a place to post without the constraints of a particular news item. A forum also exists for tracking the 2004 United States Presidential Election. In 2004, the administrators of Portal of Evil created another site, POE Sports, which is a POE News-like site devoted to irreverent coverage of sports-related stories. The site runs a fantasy football league, though with a twist; the winning participant is the one that drafts the lowest-performing players (Kordell Stewart is particularly prized), with bonus points awarded for players prone to disciplinary and legal problems. While the fantasy football was popular, the discussion forums have not generated the same traffic levels as Portal of Evil or POE News. External link
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