As far as I can tell, most of the new “Urban Legends” are just political jabs at the President. And they are all either obviously false, or came from satirical news sites.
I could have sworn it wasn’t always that way. A lot of the ULs at least sounded plausible, and, often, the ones that didn’t would turn out to be true.
And let’s not get started on their use of ads of questionable taste.
In terms of content it is, but that is bascially because Urban Legends are simply reworkings of stories.
Most of them are in some form, just tales reworked over and over and can be a hundred years old just told in different forms.
It’s like the story about the priest that fell in love with a woman, who broke his heart so he became a priest. While I’m sure it happened in real life at least once, that story is centuries old and is told about any well like priest.
So there is only a certain amount of legends that are unique and once those are rebuked you are stuck with rebuking only reworkings of those legends.
As for the actual site, that declined miserably, with all the pop-ups and such, it’s barely worth reading
Given that Snopes is basically two people with a lot of energy, I don’t fault them. As Mark said, many stories that get passed around are just recycled. As for the newer ones being political, there is absolutely a need to puncture those as well. 90% of the email I get from my parents is a FW of the latest neocon outrage about … Obama, Hilary, Dems in general, ACLU, etc. etc. etc. It’s patently obvious to ME that they are hate-mongering hype and lies, but my parents and their friends and relatives, plus a good 80% of my friends from high school, absolutely believe these things and continue to pass them around and around. To be able to look it up on Snopes and send back a link saying, “Not true” is very satisfying, even if it’s made my mother mad at me. 
P.S. Firefox + AdBlock Plus = no more ads
I agree with Marxxxx to some extent. Many of the ULs that slam Obama were told about the previous three presidents. Others are based on other fears. If you do this or that with your cell phone, computer, or just walking across a parking lot, you could be putting your life in danger from this week’s kind of madman.
I got one two days ago that was a parody of ULs.
“Warning!”
my sister in law wrote, “If an e-mail tells you that eating canned pork can give you Swine Flu, ignore it. It’s only Spam®!”
Funny this thread should show up now. My mom sent me an email she got today that says to beware of Snopes because it is run by a pair of flaming liberals who are “in the tank for Obama”. I was thinking of posting it here for help with the rebuttal, but I found a link at factcheck.org.
Yes I got that from my father about a month after I sent him the first Snopes rebuttal. :rolleyes:
I’m a bit annoyed at the pop up ads, but hey…more power to them. I have them as an iGoogle widget so I can see the new stuff every day, and decide if I want to get more info.
Can someone PLEASE tell me how to get rid of the Snopes pop-ups? My PopUpBlocker literally blocks the popups from every site except for Snopes. It’s like the Snopes popups are super-engineered mega-popups, like a division of elite bionic commandos or something.