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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.