Portal Of Evil is gone.

[rodox_video]

Chet finally pulled the trigger a few days ago. I don't know what to say, really.

The site has been dead for a good five years or more; all activity was pretty much relocated to spinoff sites poe-news and poetv many many years ago. Nobody actually makes personal sites anymore and sticks to blogs and social networking, so you could say that Portal Of Evil proper (people there call it "PoE-Red" now) had been rendered unable to deal with the modern internet's weirdness ever since.

What kind of makes me angry about this is that there was no real warning that this was going to happen. Worse, efforts to archive the site's content are being actively discouraged, and may possibly even be prevented.

This sucks because the site was a valuable window into what atrocity tourism used to be like. Portal Of Evil was civil and respectful compared to everything (say, Encyclopedia Dramatica, or /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 rest of the world that things were once done differently, is finally gone.

[sharki]

I'll miss Portal of Evil. That's how I first discovered the magnificent train wreck that was "Better Days".

[bridgeportcat]

I'm not surprised to see it go, since most of the cool folks left around 2005 or so. I'm still sad to see it gone, since I made a ton of friends there (Kthor, JSP, and pretty much all of the now-defunct COTI), but it's for the best. As you said, that way of Atrocity Tourism has gone the way of the Dodo, and this new age of it is a turd of a thing.

I still have my Struggle and Fall album, though. And a copy of Evil Video 4 I got for submitting a few clips to it.

[ProvincialTwit]

I suppose we do sort of owe some part of our existence here on Viv tangentially to PoE; at least, I think you can trace some minor lineage back through CYD.

It was good back in its day, and I like to believe it caused our good buddy Karl to finally go over the edge into full blown crazy.  (Aside: Is that why you put it in Flayrah, GR?  Kind of a tenuous connection to 'furry', at best.)

But in this day and age where just about every Internet niche has its own criticism blog (Regretsy, People of Walmart, Your ___ Is Bad, etc), and the concepts of personal restraint and 'look but don't touch' are long forgotten, PoE almost seems old fashioned.  It's all web one point oh, man.  And while I dig the hell out of some of those niche criticism blogs, I do somewhat lament the loss of the aforementioned civility of PoE.  If nothing else, there was never a question that the posters and participants were -less- ridiculous than the people they were pointing out; you can't really say that about anybody on ED (I mean look at those two crazy furfags over there with a hard-on against Pi and GreenReaper.  Haha what?).

Goodnight, sweet prince, and may a flight of angels sing thee to thy rest.

[MazelTovCocktail]

Back in the day, I bet I got more use out of Portal of Evil than Google.  I got a strange enjoyment out of the atrocity tourism aspect of it, and while the discussions weren't always-high-brow, at least the people there had a far more intelligent sense of humor than the average ED regular. 

Unfortunately, the comedy goldmine that PoE tapped into offered as limited a resource as any other goldmine.  That mine has long since been stripped clean.  Despite that, it was nice to be able to look at some of the old forums and reminisce. 

How about that... eulogizing a website...  yeah, I'll miss PoE.

[Jim Demintia]

It was good back in its day, and I like to believe it caused our good buddy Karl to finally go over the edge into full blown crazy.  (Aside: Is that why you put it in Flayrah, GR?  Kind of a tenuous connection to 'furry', at best.)

My god he's still over there with that "wah wah it's not news" bs.

[GreenReaper]

Is that why you put it in Flayrah, GR?  Kind of a tenuous connection to 'furry', at best.

A good story was submitted. I figured a fair number of people in the fandom would be interested, so I published it. Judging by the comments, I think it was the right decision.

When a story is published on Flayrah it's primarily because its author thought the topic was worth noting. I don't go around assigning stories, nor do I exercise a heavy hand over topics.

Certainly, I consider a story's tone and suitability for the omelette. But the fact is, having to register and write a coherent story in news style is sufficient to deter most unsuitable stories.

I can recall only one time that I refused a submitted story for being in the wrong place, and that's because it belonged on another furry news site, along with the stories it was responding to. It ended up on Flayrah anyway when that site closed.