The Bunk stops here

Site of The Day When it comes to urban legends, get rich quick schemes, stupid chainmail, virus hoaxes, the Internet is the most virulent infectious agent of all.

Most of this bunkum is forwarded at some point to The Reg's email inboxes. Most times we reach straight for the delete key; that's what it's there for.

But sometimes the email clamour is so persistent, we have to nail the story. (Hence last week's PC Plod fills email inboxes with The Great Scam Spam.)

So why are we receiving all this cruddy mail? Answer: people don't do their checking. The Internet makes it relatively easy to check on the provenance, reliability of scam and hoax emails.

Snopes Urban Legends Reference Pages, TruthorFiction.com, and Rob Rosenberger's Vmyths.com spring immediately to mind. But that's because they are already well-known. Just as useful is purportal.com.

Carrying the tagline "The Bunk stops here", purportal aims to stop the proliferation of all those stories that sound true.

It supplies search boxes to hoax and urban-legend collecting sites. It also links sundry scams and stories about scams.

Nice, simple design too. ®