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Content:
Q: Is everything on this site about 'urban legends'? A: In a strict folkloric sense, no. Urban legends are a specific type of folklore, and many of the items discussed on this site do not fall under the folkloric definition of "urban legend." We employ the more expansive popular (if academically inaccurate) use of "urban legend" as a term that embraces not only urban legends but also common fallacies, misinformation, old wives' tales, strange news stories, rumors, celebrity gossip, and similar items. Q: Why do you have some true stories listed as "urban legends"? A: An "urban legend" is not the same thing as a "fictional tale" or an "apocryphal anecdote," although many people mistakenly use the term in that sense (e.g., "That's not true; it's just an urban legend!"). A tale is considered to be an urban legend if it circulates widely, is told and For example, the tale about a student who mistakes a math problem thought to be unsolvable for a homework assignment and solves it is an urban legend, even though something very similar did once happen in real life. The tale is still an urban legend, however, because over the years many of its details (i.e., when it happened, where it happened, the identity of the student, the reaction of the student's instructor) have changed as it has spread. Q: I know something listed on your site really happened (or is otherwise true), but your site doesn't list it as true. Why not? There are several reasons why this might be so:
A: Our glossary page provides definitions of site- and folklore-specific terms that may be unfamiliar to some readers. Q: Some of these stories are pretty racy. How about creating a sanitized version of the site for the kids? A: That would be difficult to do because urban legends are expressions of adult fears and concerns and, as such, often convey those messages via stories that are unsuitable for children. We also cannot decide for other people what their children should or should not read. Q: How come you sometimes analyze the content of political pieces, but other times you only verify who wrote them? A: In general, when a political piece is primarily an editorial or other expression of opinion (and is attributed to a well-known public figure or someone deemed to have particular expertise in the subject covered), we place it in our "Soapbox" section and attempt to verify only whether the attribution is correct (since opinions are not falsifiable, the attribution is the sole aspect of the piece that may be objectively determined as being true or false). When a political piece purports to offer facts, we place it in a relevant category and analyze the factual claims made within for veracity. Q: Who creates the material for this site? A: With very few exceptions, all of the material on this site is prepared by the same people who operate this site, Barbara and David Mikkelson. Q: How do I know the information you've presented is accurate? A: We don't expect anyone to accept us as the ultimate authority on any topic, which is why our site's name indicates that it contains reference pages. Unlike the plethora of anonymous individuals who create and send the unsigned, unsourced Q: I spotted a typo on your site. Should I report it? A: Corrections are always welcome, but keep in mind that text appearing inside a bordered box with a colored background is either an example of collected folklore or a quotation from another source, not our own writing. Because these items are pieces of folklore, we reproduce them exactly as we find them and do not edit them to correct orthographical errors. Q: I want to put a link to your site on my own site. Is that okay? A: Certainly! Q: May I reproduce your material on my web site? A: No. You are welcome to link to any of our articles from your site, but you may not reproduce the content of our pages on your own site, nor may you distribute the text of our articles via If you wish to direct other people to read a particular article on our site, please use the Q: May I reproduce your material on my web site if I operate a non-commercial site, and I give you credit? A: No. Using our material without our permission is copyright infringement, even if your site is non-commercial, and even if you give us credit. Q: Why are you so hung up about copyrights? A: Because we work hard to keep our information accurate and current, and when other people reprint our material we no longer have any ability to update it when new information becomes available. Reprinting our material without permission also deprives us of the advertising revenues we need to continue operating this site as a free resource. Advertising and Finances: Q: Who pays you to maintain this site? A: We have no sponsors, investors, or partners, nor do we have any affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any outside group or agency. We pay all the costs of producing and operating this web site out of our own pockets, and our only income comes from advertising revenues and public donations. Q: Can I make a donation to help you with your efforts? Please see our donations page for additional information. Q: Why do you display ads for the same things you're writing about? Are you being paid to write those articles? A: Some of the advertising carried on our site is supplied by Google's AdSense program, a system that scans the text of web pages and automatically displays ads for related products and services. We have no way of controlling which advertisers Google selects to display on our site, and the appearance of any particular advertiser on our site does not constitute an endorsement on our part. Also, since we have a large and diverse variety of advertisements rotating through our site every day, and we cover a wide range of topics on our site, occasionally an advertisement for a particular business or product may display on page that includes editorial content about that same business or product out of sheer coincidence. We are not (and never have been) paid or provided with any other form of remuneration in exchange for writing about a particular topic. Q: The ads on your site are really annoying. Why don't you get rid of them? A: This site is expensive to maintain, and we pay all the operating costs out of our own pockets. We carry advertising in order to defray those costs and provide this service as a free resource for everyone. We do our best to ensure the advertisements we carry on our site are as inoffensive as possible, and we filter out ads that flash excessively, contain adult material, play (non-user-initiated) audio, spawn multiple windows, automatically trigger downloads, install malware, or misleadingly claim readers have won sweepstakes or contests. However, with several hundred different advertisers rotating through our site on a daily basis, we don't always have the chance to preview every advertisement appearing on our site (and vet all the sites they link to), so sometimes we're not aware we're carrying an ad that violates these guidelines until a reader points it out to us. (Some advertisers deliberately change their names from month to month or furtively switch pre-approved ad copy in order to bypass filters and fool advertising agencies and webmasters who have previously excluded their ads.) If you find an advertisement on our site that violates any of the guidelines mentioned above, please use our "Contact Us" form to send the details (e.g., name of the advertiser, description of the ad, a screen capture of the ad) to us, and we'll investigate removing it from our site. Please note that without these details (especially screen shots) it is often difficult for us to identify a particular problem Q: Why do you place ads so that they cover up some of the text in your articles? A: All of our advertising is carefully positioned so that it does not obscure any of the text or other elements within our articles. If you are encountering difficulties with advertisements overlaying text on our site, the most likely causes are:
Q: Why does every page on your site trigger a pop-up ad? A: We do not accept pop-up ads for our site (only pop-under ads), and we try to minimize their intrusiveness by ensuring that no reader sees more than one or two pop-under advertisements per visit to our site. This limitation is accomplished through the setting of cookies by the agencies that delivers ads to our site. If you are seeing more than a few pop-under ads per visit, the most likely cause is that the security configuration of your browser or firewall is blocking these cookies. Q: Why do you code your pop-unders to defeat pop-up blocking software? A: We do not code any advertisements; we simply reproduce the standard Q: Why does my security software register intrusion attempts when I visit your site? A: Most Internet advertising agencies use cookies to keep track of which ads have been displayed to a particular visitor. These cookies do not acquire or collect any personal information about visitors (such as name, address, phone number, or If you are uncomfortable with the use of cookies to temporarily store non-personal information, you can delete the cookie or alter your browser's security settings to prevent it from accepting cookies. Technical Questions: Q: Why do I see a frowning green face instead of graphics when I view your pages? A: Because we've had so many problems with other sites hotlinking to our graphics (thereby using up a large portion of our bandwidth), we've implemented an anti-hotlinking configuration. If any site other than our own attempts to display one of our images, the attempt will fail and a picture of a frowning green face will be displayed instead. If you are visiting our site but are seeing pictures of a frowning green face in place of our graphics, the most likely causes are that you are going through a proxy server, or you are using a firewall or browser configured in such a way that it does not present valid referrer information to our web server. Q: Why do some links open up in new browser windows? A: Whenever we include a link that jumps you to a different section of our web site (or off our site entirely), we open the linked page in a separate window to maintain continuity and ensure that you don't lose your place. Q: The colored bullets identifying whether entries are true or false are useless to me because I'm (red-green) color blind. Why don't you change them? A: We chose our red-yellow-green coding system because its "traffic light" pattern can be understood by most of our readers with little or no explanation. While we understand that about 8% of our readership experiences some form of color blindness and therefore cannot distinguish the different colors of bullets, other alternatives we have tried have proved confusing to many of our non-color blind readers. Therefore, we have chosen to stick with a system that works very well for 92% of our readers. We have employed some alternative coding methods to accommodate our color blind readers:
Q: What are 'snopes'? A: Snopes is the name of a family of characters who appear throughout the works of American writer William Faulkner. See the Faulkner on the Web glossary entry about Snopes for more information. Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2008 by snopes.com. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com. |
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