Portal of Evil

» see portalofevil.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Portal of Evil ran in American time zones and in English, arguing about American shareware pages. In 2002 I was in an Ankara internet cafe on counter-strike with MSN open in the background. Turkish forum culture existed and I was in it, on donanimhaber and frmtr, where the currency was your hardware list in your signature and the arguments were about motherboards. Nobody there was cataloging the strange corners of the web for sport, and I doubt a Turkish version of PoE would have found an audience.

The site was founded in late 1999 by K. Thor Jensen and Chet Faliszek, working out of Cleveland, Ohio. The mechanic was simple enough to describe in a sentence. Members submitted links to strange personal websites and the site indexed each one with a short write-up. The forum did the rest. Jensen called the idea a Yahoo for the strange, which is accurate as a description of the structure and undersells the tone completely.

The raw material was the personal web of the late nineties. GeoCities pages, Angelfire pages, a man's exhaustive shrine to one cartoon character, somebody's self-published cosmology with the diagrams included. PoE cataloged them, and the community's own name for what it was doing was atrocity tourism, used without much defensiveness.

~ the case file ~

~ the prime directive ~

The rule at the top of the site read: do not contact the site listed, do not email the site owner, do not post in their guestbooks, do not post in their forums. Members called it the Prime Directive and it was enforced. A forum built entirely on laughing at strangers, with a hard prohibition on ever touching the strangers.

It is worth sitting with that for a second, because everything that came afterward abandoned it. A member writing the week PoE closed said the place had been civil and respectful compared to Encyclopedia Dramatica and 4chan's /b/, where reaching out to the target stopped being the violation and became the objective. Read that as nostalgia if you want. The rule was still printed on the page, and handing out somebody's personal information got you removed.

~ the slide ~

Something Awful was the larger rival and stayed larger for the whole run. The problem that actually finished PoE was not competition, it was supply. The site existed because the web was full of pages built by hand by people with no editor and no sense that anyone was watching. That is what made them worth indexing.

Social networks ended it. Once everybody moved onto profiles that all looked alike, the design was done for them and the audience was visible from the first day, so the pages stopped being strange in the way PoE needed. Members said as much after the closure, pointing at the disappearance of GeoCities-class free hosting. Traffic drifted to PoE-News, the sister site for odd news stories, which by the end was busier than the parent it was spun off from.

~ what it became ~

The last working capture of portalofevil.com is 13 January 2011. From 8 February the address answers 403 Forbidden and does so for the rest of that year. flayrah reported the closure on 12 February 2011 and described it as having happened the week before, which brackets the end to about three weeks. There was no announcement anyone recorded, and members complained that attempts to preserve the content were being discouraged rather than helped. A search engine one member had built over the index survived, last updated in October 2005.

Then the domain came back wearing the old logo. Through 2012 and 2013 portalofevil.com served video listings from PoETV, the other sister site, under the same header image the directory had used. In 2026 the address does not resolve at all, and neither does poe-news.com. Chet Faliszek went to Valve in 2005 and spent twelve years there writing Left 4 Dead and co-writing Portal 2, which has nothing to do with the site's name and is a coincidence worth naming before somebody else does.

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