November 22, 2004

Curious George: Fake Websites Like This One? I am a university professor, looking for fake websites that I can use in my methods course. Link goes to the classic example. [more inside]
posted by LarryC 20 years ago
  • I am teaching Historical Methods this semester--basically how to do research. My students are bright and hardworking, but way too uncritical of information they find on the internet. Their next assignment will be to evaluate some websites. For each of my 15 students, I would like to include one clever fake website, like Boilerplate. It makes for a fun excercise, but I don't have enough fake websites to go around. Can you monkeys help in this grand educational endeavor? The fake sites don't have to have a history theme, but they should be, at first glance, credible.
  • Great idea! Sounds like you're looking for a modern-day Spaghetti Harvest. Look forward to seeing the responses, and I'll try to put my noggin to this one.
  • Dog Island.
  • Confuse a Cat, Ltd. However, they do state quite plainly that they're fake, so that might bugger the whole deal. Still, it's funny.
  • Viral Advert site Any car buffs in your class might know about this one though... it was pretty prevalent on the web, in fact it made a reappearance here on the 15th of November (I think)...
  • snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/hoaxes.asp (Sadly, quite a few of them - BabyInk, for example - are no more.)
  • ClonesRUs was one of my favorites for just this kind of assignment. Sadly, it appears to be gone, but you can find it is the wayback machine. In 1998 when I first used it there were few sites that looked this professional. I pulled the legs of many college students and even some high school biology teachers. ClonesRUS via intenetarchive These are not all high quality, but there are a few I might use in my web site evaluation presentation. Hoax sites
  • Then there are some that may or may not be fake... but one really hopes it's a joke! cookingwithcum.com Of course, your could always direct them to coreyfeldman.info
  • by your... I, of course, mean you is it too soon to joke about the CF.info thingy?... don't kill me, it's just a link to our front page... :)
  • http://web.csuchico.edu/~ka58/dwsm/classes.html
  • Genochoice is pretty slick, for those that want to create their own child.
  • what toohep said sorry... I'm reaaly bored at work, and I only have 5 minutes before I can leave... don't mean to be a noodnik....
  • Last post for today, I promise... Itch... I love the fact that the doctor on Genochoice looks alot like Helen Hunt... Paging Dr. Paul Reiser!!
  • One candidate for the scientifically-challenged: the Dihydrogen Monoxide consumer advocacy site
  • If you're looking for fake sites done in bad taste: Bonsai Kitten. One of my friends sent me a petition to sign against this site. I had to gently point them towards the snopes link above.
  • I remember finding this link in college and it freaked me out. It's about male pregnancy. Very effective website!!! It makes you seriously consider that this may be a real site.
  • One of my friends is responsible for PETAlgae, although it's pretty obviously a joke.
  • Driver's License Search or Shards O'Glass. There's a ton of 'em out there, Larry. You should have no problem at all finding 15.
  • alas, manbeef is no more! there's a snapshot of the original site linked from here, though (with more explanation--and no, it's not just the tenderloin).
  • I don't know if this qualifies as a fake website, but while this site's disclaimer says: Hoosier Gazette articles are drawn from different sources and some are fictitious or satirical. The Hoosier Gazette uses invented names in some stories, except in cases where public figures are being satirized. Any other use of real names is accidental and coincidental. The reader should suspend belief for the sake of enjoyment. several times in the last year their stories have been run by major news outlets in the belief the stories were legitimate, and much of the feedback they get is from people who are taking them seriously.
  • I always send my students to the (unfortunately real, but horrible) martinlutherking.org This looks like a credible website, and students always thing .org = trustworthy, but it's actually a white supremacist site (be warned about that!). I also send them to hitler.org, another white supremacist website. This one always confuses my students because the front page repeatedly says that it is an "unbiased" version of Hitler's story. My students always thing biased = bad. Then I tell them that you *have* to be biased about Hitler, because it's ok to think he's evil. If you want my assignment sheet for this, email me (it's in the profile) and I'll be happy to send it your way.
  • I have always enjoyed the museum of jurassic technology
  • Here are a couple of sites that might suit you. Lutec Better living Electricity should be free
  • Not exactly what you're looking for, but I find Black People Love Us usually messes with people's minds.
  • I have always enjoyed the museum of jurassic technology When I lived in L.A., I'd take out-of-towners to the Museum of Jurassic Technology for my own twisted amusement. They'd wander the beautifully-presented exhibits in silence, straining to find any rational connection between a Stink Ant from Cameroon and an intricately carved fruit-stone. We'd stumble out into daylight and I'd say 'really, after visiting the MJT, there's really no sense in visiting the hodge-podge collection at Getty...but we can go if you'd like.' Anyway, consider a visit to Molvania.
  • on of my all time fave-o-rites is manbeef. maybe i'm partial...i ship human organs for transplant for a living, so i found the site pretty damn funny. the site's now off-line(gone), but the link above does include a screen capture of the old site. classic.
  • ahh...i am a dreaded double poster. sorry to try and steal your thunder patita. i will now go flog myself for my transgression. peace offering?
  • Great stuff, and links to more, thanks so much! I promise to come back here in a day or two and post a list of what I ended up using.
  • This one goes way way back. I believe it was first on the internets in 1995. Kind of funny if anyone has ever been unfortunate enough to actually visit Mankato, Minnesota.
  • Not quite on topic perhaps, but you might have quite a debate about the role of sites like Wikipedia; you could also look at debunking sites like skepdic.com, nizkor.org, snopes.com and ask how we know whether they themselves are trustworthy. If you could report back this it would make a great post.
  • On which topic, snopes' 'Lost Legends' pages are a nice case study - they're completely fictitious, put onto the site as an encouragement to critical thinking and a warning against single-source authorities. Naturally, several of them have been taken at face value by people who'd claim to know better...
  • A couple "organizations" that happen to be hosted on a site I run: Save the Guinea Worm Foundation The Coalition to End Female Mammary Mutilation
  • scadenfreude, the Museum of Jurassic Technology is an actual museum, and a going concern from the mid-80s until the last time I checked, two or three years ago.
  • Ninja Burger (my friend does this site) Sweet! I'm wearing a Ninja Burger T-Shirt right now, actually. Objective.JesusSave.us is my favorite of the fake sites, personally. It took a long time for most people to figure out that the site was fake. Epsilon Program was a fake site for the GTA: San Andreas promotion.
  • Awesome, shawnj! I've got the card game on my Xmas list. =) JesusSave.us is the one that did the Creationist Science Fair! Oh, man that was a hoot. For those that like cannibal humor - sort of a self-link, it's my best friend's site and I did a bit of the writing on it (recipes, updates).
  • clouds_taste_metallic, what I find interesting is that we used the same site and wording. no need to apologize! the power of manbeef is to unite!
  • Get your hunt on. Quite an impressive amount of material on this site, quite obviously fake, but all done completely straight.
  • whitehouse.org By the way, I am a complete moron. I have no idea how to make the anything be a link when I am commenting. If someone would care to talk to me like a child for a moment, I would appreciate it.
  • bernockle, here's how you do it. Instead of square brackets, use pointy brackets < and >. [a href="http://www.monkeyfilter.com"]text link [/a]
  • manbeef synchronicity...strange, but good. we can only hope that some great mind will one day make a fake website that will bring the great teachings of manbeef to the unholy masses. i quick search reveals that "thechurchofmanbeef.org" seems to still be available. hmmm, i've always wanted my own church...
  • You are a fucking genius, mct. What can I ever dop to repay you?
  • Spoke too soon. Forgot to preview. I am a nitwit.
  • Ha! You only have to tell me how to do something seven or eight times before I get it. Is four comments in a row illegal? Sorry I had to work out my personal issues in front of the world like this.
  • Just copy that line that I wrote, replace the square brackets with pointys, and replace the monkeyfilter address with the whitehouse address. Don't take off the http:// part of the address.
  • Bernockle: Type in this: [a href="http://www.monkeyfilter.com"]MonkeyFilter [/a] And substitute a < for every [ and a > for every ].
  • Ah, there you go.
  • MonkeyFilter (Don't sweat it, Bernockle. I had to try it out myself...and I usually get it wrong 50% of the time.)
  • MonkeyFilter: Replace The Square Brackets With Pointys
  • bernockle, cut and paste this somewhere in a text document, and next time, just shade and replace the "http://INSERTLINK.COM" bit with your link, bob's your uncle :) <a href="http://INSERTLINK.COM">LINK NAME</a>
  • Oh! But don't get rid of the " " quotation marks when you paste over, or it won't work!
  • Or hit the ZOG key and click on FORNAX.
  • Everytime I hit the ZOG key, my pants shrink. Is there a way around that?
  • I admit I've been sucked in by the Hoosier Gazette before, after I read an "article" there that said parents were dumber than people without children. There's a button at the bottom though that asks people to vote for them as the best satire site on the web.
  • the church of manbeef: whether your brackets be pointy or square, we accomodate you!
  • I was going to link to the Federal Vampire & Zombie Agency, but I see middleclasstool beat me to it. Excellent site. So instead, I'll bring you one I posted here a long, long time ago: Lip Balm Anonymous. It took some serious digging to find out the guy made up the entire site. Considering I'm not the only one addicted to my lip balm, I fell for this one hard.
  • This may be a perfect example to run by your class: http://www.mavav.org Mothers Against Videogame Addiction & Violence. Sounds reasonable. Website seems to be well thought out. There's research there. All systems go to copy and paste. But, look at this site: http://a.parsons.edu/~dyoo/2002-3/interactivity/mavav/ Resources: This was the SHOCKER. All the content on this page is completely false, full of fake facts I made up, mixed with a bit of over exaggerated stereotypes. I tried to offend different genre-groups within the gaming community (but not specific games) hoping to get a more widespread reaction. I was actually worried that this page looked too real, so I decided to add in my much-hated Report Card. I was so sure my report card would present MAVAV as a fake, but I was wrong.
  • OK, here is my promised post on the assignment. I handed it out today. I told the students that they were to evaluate 4 web sites, one assigned and three that they would select themselves. The full handout is at the class blog The History Geek. Then I gave each of them one assigned, fake website, without in any way letting on that the sites are fake. On the other hand, the class is very used at this point to my sense of humor and my evil professor habit of tricking them, so most will catch on pretty quick. Because of the stifiling conservatism of the area, I didn't feel I could use many of the wonderful suggested sites that contained either adult content of religious satire. Here are the ones I did use: Neil Armstrong: The Awful Truth: http://www.blogjam.com/neil_armstrong/ Boilerplate: Mechanical Marvel of the 19th Century: http://www.bigredhair.com/boilerplate/index.html Horse of a Different Color: http://www.snopes.com/lost/mistered.asp Save the Tree Octopus: http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus.html Coalition to Promote the Use of Child Soldiers http://www.boring.ch/childsoldiers/ Little Known Attractions of Lynchburg and Central Virginia: http://www.retroweb.com/lynchburg/attractions/main.html THE CENTAUR EXCAVATIONS AT VOLOS http://web.utk.edu/~blyons/centaur.html Bonsai Kitten: http://www.bonsaikitten.com/bkintro.html Dihydrogen Monoxide: http://www.dhmo.org/ The Emily Chesley Reading Circle: http://www.emilychesley.com/ Dream Dollars: http://www.dream-dollars.com/ Bearing the Flag: http://www.snopes.com/lost/bearflag.asp The White House: http://www.whitehouse.org/ The Formation of NATO: http://www.historyhouse.com/in_history/nato/ Dog Island: http://www.thedogisland.com/ Genochoice: http://www.genochoice.com/ CSUC Underwater Basket Weaving Department http://web.csuchico.edu/~ka58/dwsm/classes.html People for the Ethical Treatment of Algae http://petalgae.com/ Hoosier Gazette: http://www.hoosiergazette.com/News/Nov2004/news003.htm museum of jurassic technology http://www.mjt.org/ Penguin Warehouse: http://www.penguinwarehouse.com/ Black People Love Us! http://www.blackpeopleloveus.com/ Florida State University* Cannibalism Club http://www.hotliquor.com/fsucc/index.html The Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency http://www.fvza.org/ The student will return with their assignments next week. Thanks again for all the help!