Early atrocity tourism website Portal of Evil closes
Portal of Evil (PoE) closed down last week after over a decade of "atrocity tourism".
The site – founded in late 1999 by Cleveland, Ohio-based duo K. Thor Jensen and Chet Faliszek – was a directory of "weird, unusual and evil" websites, each discussed and mocked in turn by PoE forum members. Numerous furry sites were featured, including the website of 2 the Ranting Gryphon (who devoted a rant to PoE), Cub Central, and webcomics such as Sabrina Online.
The site never gained as much notoriety in the furry fandom as rival site Something Awful (SA), but PoE had a contingent of furry posters and as much furry content as SA, if not more. Members of the website were also important in the founding of later "anti-furry" groups, including the Burned Fur movement (whose website was, ironically, also featured on PoE) and the website Crush! Yiff! Destroy! (which closed down last spring).
Former forum members speculate that the proliferation of social networking sites, which effectively replaced webhosting services such as GeoCities, led to the gradual decline and ultimate shut-down of PoE. Such small, personal sites were an early staple of Portal of Evil. With a lack of new content, most of the forum's posters moved to PoE's sister site PoE-News, which features "evil" news.
A search engine created by forum member codehappy retains some information on the site, though it was last updated October 2005.
There is some forum speculation that the site may return; previous reports of the site's demise have been exaggerated.
About the author
crossaffliction (Brendan Kachel) — read stories — contact (login required)a reporter and Red Fox from Hooker, Oklahoma, interested in movies, horror, stand up comedy
Formerly Wichita's only furry comic.
Comments
So long, PoE. You will not be missed.
Amen
Portal Of Evil was civil and respectful compared to everything (Encyclopedia Dramatica, /b/) that came after it. As nasty as it could get on the inside, posters there were actively prohibited from giving out people's personal information and contacting site owners directly. This behavior is now encouraged and rewarded by the Anonymous crowd.
PoE may have been dead for years, but now it's shambling corpse, the only reminder to the outside world that things were once done differently, is finally gone. Worse, it's been pulled with no real warning, and efforts toward preserving it's content are being actively discouraged and prevented.
Nobody here will EVER admit this, but furry is probably a better place because of PoE. It gave the subculture a thicker skin. Not a thick ENOUGH skin, if recent media bullshit is any indication, but at least there's less unwarranted shock and ridiculous whining whenever the outside world peers in and is baffled/disgusted by what it sees.
As nasty as it could get on the inside, posters there were actively prohibited from giving out people's personal information and contacting site owners directly.
Actually, funny thing.
Um, Chet is giving out the reason for actually shutting down (rather than letting it limp on or even putting up a read only version) is to protect them from lawsuits from, well, personal information that was posted.
Which is ironic. A lot of sarcastic "Oh no, lawsuit!" posts went to data heaven when PoE went down.
Nobody here will EVER admit this, but furry is probably a better place because of PoE.
I will. As my article points out, PoE is the birthplace for the fandom's, I don't know what you'd call it, internal police. That's not the right words, but whatever. This is where the Burned Furs came from; I think history has proven (even though they all apparently ate each other alive) that they actually did accomplish something. Bestiality is, if not eliminated in the fandom, at least not openly tolerated, either. I think that progress goes straight back to the Burned Furs, and therefore PoE. CYD and even Vivisector can trace their ancestry back to PoE; I think the fandom needs sites like that.
I don't think the Burned Furs caused less zoophiles to be furries... I mean, I wasn't around for that stuff, and whether they existed or not I'd still not be a zoophile.
No, what I'm saying is at the beginning of the last decade, we wouldn't have people calling the cops on a guy who says he had sex with his dog on a furry forum, which happened in 2009. In 2001, this person probably wouldn't have even gotten a reprimand.
At the beginning of the decade, we had external criticism (PoE, SA, et al) plus internal criticism (the Burned Furs). Of course, though both groups set the ground work, the real change happened when the Vanity Fair article, the CSI episode and the MTV documentary hit; basically, what the first two groups had been been complaining about was confirmed as the "mainstream" perception of the fandom, and then change was (sadly, rather reluctantly) started.
I can assure you, at the beginning of the last decade, I still would have called the cops. I didn't change, and all I can speak for is myself.
Portal of Evil wouldn't have been as well, "evil" had it not tolerated, for the sake of even more lulz, some of the truly insane people who used it as an excuse for vendetta with their personal enemies in furry and related subcultures. It was the same thing that helped rip the burned furs apart; for every person who might've actually wanted the fandom to treat itself more respectably, there was a ranting lunatic who attached themselves to the burned furs (or the PoE forums) and just wanted to start shit and hound people they hated into oblivion. These folks knew that the 'prime directive' wasn't a problem; they could use PoE threads as reference links across the internet in other locations where they wished to start trouble.
Given the nature of a site like PoE of course, there is no way the anonymous crowd couldn't approve of more lulz whatever the source. So it was fated to happen.
The activities of the PoE or the BF may have lead to a greater awareness of some facets of the fandom, and of less tolerance of elements that some people may not approve of. But it was more the inevitable result of any sort of criticism being put out there. Neither PoE for the Burned gang were some sort underdog some members wished to portray themselves as. Mostly, it boiled down to the typical internet cockfight of assholes flaming pricks.
And nothing of value was lost.
POE good riddance and RIH. MY Hello Kitty blog got the POE treatment some time ago.
Yawn. Someone elimiate the Encyclopedia Dramtica from existance. Then I'll cheer. I lost a whole decade to that fsking troll site.
So I see someone just went through rating every comment a 1. Funny how such mild criticism as this struck a nerve so easily.
Said it before, say it again: There is NOTHING as thin-skinned as a troll. Not furries. Not religious activists. Not even frigging Scientologists.
Or perhaps someone wanted to rile you up, and succeeded... Just a thought.
One big difference between PoE and SA/ED was the "look, don't touch" policy (the violation of which would result in banning). Despite all of your thin-skinned furry whining, PoE's taunting and criticism was kept on its own forums.
Probably why it died off, people evolved from just being entertain by looking and wanted to become 'activists', so they all moved on to SA.
Plus Google probably killed the archive site star. You don't need to list sites into categories anymore.
Well, I wouldn't've known about the PoE if it weren't for @$$holes posting me about it every five minutes and telling me how worthless I am as a human being about it.
At least when they learned that I was about to just throw away my computer because of all the flack I got (This wasn't going to be one of the more expected leaving the internets, I was considering something incredibly stupid) some of them actually was able to talk me off the ledge.
ED would want to tape the whole thing off their cellphones and want to write the eulogies in front of my friends and family, and then do a group piss on my grave.
I don't answer most of my E-Mail or IMs on the phone (and I had to change my AIM account as well) because of their ilk.
While the "look, but don't touch" policy is great in theory, since I could care less what people think or say on their own sever, in practice it was less ideal. I've remember a few sites that saw a sudden influx of trolls as soon as they appeared on PoE or their old threads got a fresh wave of posts. It wasn't that huge of a number compared to what ED and SA can bring, so maybe the policy helped some. And whether it was actual PoE members or just the result of PoE advertising the site to lurkers was indistinguishable.
Atrocity tourism is nothing new to the web, nor is it something which will ever go away.
A couple of the more known furry atrocity tourism websites are furrydrma_2 and vivisector. I've contributed to such sites in the past, but back in October I realized they obtain nothing but continuing drama.
People should go outside instead of continuing drama or trolling people based on events.
Since I know someone will mention DNH. There's a difference between drama and making a site for safety reasons.
Exactly, instead you call the individual's parent's, or go to the person's website hosts with child porn threats, or tell payalert about other sites that have cub porn just because it happened to FA. That stops the drama right quick, don't it?
I prefer to kill drama by action instead of bitching about it.
I don't think that so much as kills it as just replaces it with something else.
I equate most of the drama to children.
You can have the children which do one of the two things:
1) incessantly bicker and complain about specific drama, or
2) Take away their toys, hear them bitch for a while and they'll move on.
Be around kids more, you'll understand.
That's why you were banned from AC and Furrydrama_2, amirite?
And DNH? That IS a drama site. You're inciting drama and trying to start a witch hunt cause umad you got banned from AC.
And spare me your "safety" bullshit. There IS a way to clean a fursuit properly. And there has been NO evidence saying fursuiters hug random people at cons. You're nothing but a drama whore. A notoriously unstable person who gets banned from a con after threatening to beat up another fur, tries to get a art style banned (Won't someone think of the fictional children?) which failed epically, and now you're going after fursuiters.
You're gonna keep doing this shit, and eventually someone's gonna get pissed enough to do something about it.
Oh, and love the Cub porn on your FA. I would say FA would do something about it, but we all know that the staff are buddies with most of the CP artists. So it flies.
On topic;
Nothing of value was lost.
Since I haven't heard of Portal of Evil since... well the early naughties, I'm not suprised to hear it's closing off. In fact alot of archive 'list' sites of the nineties will probably be gone, if they aren't all ready.
When you can find "evil" just by typing it into Google you don't need a website telling you where it is.
I never paid attention to those sites, so I really don't care. But I guess it's good to know.
Did this site, and do other sites like it, make any financial profit for it's owners?
Something Awful has ads, merchandise and a $10 entry fee - it might be enough to support the founder and the site. I doubt anyone's getting rich off of it, though.
They don't have to: Advertisers wouldn't touch ED with a ten-foot pole, yet someone is allways willing to part X thousand dollars every other month to support it. And here I'm thinking, don't they have something better to spend their time, energy and even money on? Is mocking other people and flashing their [beep] at them the pinnacle of what they want to accomplish in life?
Well, to them it's like their pornography or drug, it fullfills something they are lacking, and thus will poor their cash into it, like any addiction really.
I was wondering what happened to PoE, I was thinking that it crashed because there's just an Apache test page there now. I would think that the site's owners would at least have put up a notice that they were closing.
I heard about PoE after it started, through other Furs talking about it, but I never visited because they said it was anti-Fur, and I didn't like to read the negative stuff.
A few years later they made my site an Exhibit, I found out and joined PoE so that I could defend Skippy, one of my photo-morphic characters.
A reasonable Fur wouldn't get involved with a site like that, but I liked the debate, and people there were 'real' compared to a lot of forums, and some were even Furries themselves.
I like the unusual, weird and outrageous, so yeah, I guess I'm an atrocity tourist too, and I stuck around, and got a lot out of the sites that they posted, all from behind the safety of my screen.
I got involved in a couple of other site forums there too, like one about Zoophilia, and when my friend Saintly Bernard's site was added I was right in the middle of that one too.
Last year they ran the story of me trying to change my name, which actually got several hundred comments and well wishes. Some remembered that I was an exhibit there before, and they knew that I was real. That was a win for sure.
I'm sad to see it go, I never thought that they hated Furries for real, maybe it just can come across that way when people are trying to understand what something is about.
Boomer The Dog
boomerthedog.net
C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER
You know, my avatar, the blurry fox thing, with the giant purple word "RABIES," that's from PoE. It was a lj quiz thingy; the full text is "If I were a horrible affliction, I would be RABIES." One of the posters saw it and posted it from the "LJ Random Image Generator." Specifically called me out, since I was the fox furry who had the word "affliction" in my screenname.
I adopted it utterly, much to his chagrin.
That same guy wrote to very good poem parodies about me; one was of Shelley's "Ozymandias." That's appropriate.
Goodbye, PoE.
I'll see you in Hell.
Hi crossafliction. your real name is visible to everyone, thot youd want to know
I doubt that's a concern, considering it's also on his listed homepage. Why the obsession with people's 'real' names?
For people who fear even making posts without even putting in their faux name in the guest box probably have the misconception that everyone fears having their identity revealed as much as they themselves do?
I just fear being found out under that faux name and recieving a full round of endless flames and trolling by people who are offended by my attempt to overcoming my lulcow status.
Hi, Daveykins! End of an era, end of an era. No more will the tears of outraged furries sustain howls of desk-pounding mirth in the murky threads of PoE. It shall be missed by all who love Teh Funney™.
Pourin out a fawty...
I haven't used Daveykins in ages. Am I still being regarded as such here?
Hi, moron. You're dumb. And also stupid. Thought you'd want to know.
Yeah I still post to PoE sites, Poe-News and PoeTV, about Dog related issues. They are repost video sites now, but some of the same old denizens who posted on the old Atrocity site still post there. I find a good amount of strange videos there, so I keep those as my main video feed sites.
Boomer
Basically (so nobody gets confused by Boomer's posting here) the original Portal of Evil (PoE Proper, PoE Red or just Poe to the forum goers) which consisted of an archive of "evil" sites closed when this article was actually news.
Spinoff site PoE-News, which featured "evil" news (basically just another weird news site), was more popular than PoE Proper at the time of its close (as it also featured a variety of general forums for things like Books and Movies, which PoE never really had), but the site owners eventually got bored of it, too, so they left. The new guys in charge tried for a while, then decided to close down. I believe the forums are still up as read only (though I haven't checked in a while, and this is just a comment, not an actual article, so I'm too lazy to look it up), but the main page is now just another redirect site for PoETV, which is an "evil" video site (basically weird YouTube videos); I never had a presence there, but it's the last surviving bit of PoE.
good riddance. if anyone misses the cretins over at PoE here is one of the faggots who used to harass people and violate their (PoE) prime objective. the fact they say they never contact or harass sites they don't like is total bullocks. ask new york police detectives about one k. thor jensen... who decided he was scared to death of one of his victims when it was learned his address, work and where his kid goes to school... k. thor jensen used the site to abuse people he had issue with. it took threats from new york police detectives to get him to stop. you can see the humiliation over here; http://kthorjensen.blogspot.com
I think it's good that you're able to admit it, that can be good to cleanse the soul. Still I think we've all done cretinous things we regret, so maybe just see it as a part of growing up and out, not be so hard on yourself and move on.
My 'Dogmatic' site was exhibit there, and it was obscure, with a few visitors a week, but it wasn't much to bark about, just some Doggie drawings and photomorphs on Furtopia, and never really updated. (archived here: http://boomerthedog.com/dogmatic/ for ref.)
One day the site stats showed a ton of visits, and I found it from reading site stats, no one from Portal of Evil got in touch with me. I don't know why they chose my site, but someone posted my character Skippy and he's a photomorph, kind of different, but I guess fewer Furs were doing photomorphs at the time.
Anyway, I visited to see what was up and joined PoE, and sure they played rough but I liked the debate, it was real, and over personal ideas and beliefs, rather than just someone's art style, 'yiffing', tracing characters or anything Furries were always talking about at the time. I opened up with that debate, and barked about some of the aspects of being a Dog for the first time there, I consider that PoE 'discovered' me on the net.
I stayed with them and barked about other exhibits, not posting a lot but reading regularly and was there until the they closed. I would post comments to some of the videos or sites because I was interested in the subjects, but it wasn't to violate the Prime Directive.
I'm sure there are cretins on any site, but in most ways 'it's just words on the internet', so why let those blokes bother you? If they can engage you in real life involving detectives, you're probably just as much of a mess as they are. I'm just going by the booklet that my ISP gave me when I signed up with them, about conduct and etiquette on the net and online debate, 1990s.
Boomer, 'What-A-Mess'.. ;)
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