Talk:The Best Page in the Universe/Archive 1

message: *Introduction explains relevance (rework and tighten up existing one)
*Since this is an article about the site, not the author, begin with an overview of the site's content, followed by additional details about Maddox.
*Keep April Fools and MAM sections
*Remove Lou images section (it doesn't merit its own section)
*Too many lists of facts: rewrite
*Trim down external links
*Maybe more discussion of knockoff and fan sites —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pgschol (talk • contribs) 11:23, 26 April 2005
Maybe put the imitations in the "Internet Popularity" section, if wished discription of the fanpages could go there as well.DevinTheGrand 16:35, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposal for polishing up this article

message: To suggest that the coding of Maddox's page and that of "Mothers against Maddox" is similar.
Maddox makes use of javascript and style sheets; MAM does not.  Maddox shows little regard for whether an HTML tag is capitalized or not, and tends to use line breaks quite a bit, while MAM is textbook HTML, all lowercase and mostly inline.
A Sample from Maddox's site:
<BODY BGCOLOR="black" TEXT="white" LINK="yellow" VLINK="FF0000">


<P>

Yes, it was April Fool's last week you morons.


<P>

Last week I decided to do something I hadn't done before by posting an 
<A HREF="c.cgi?u=april_fools04">April Fool's</A>
prank on my site.  I started writing it around midnight, and there was
a point when I sat staring at 
the obnoxious white background and thought to myself "this is
too obvious, nobody could possibly be dumb enough to fall for
this shit."  After all, if the "Mr. Clean" parody icon (a not-so-subtle nod
towards my new direction in content), the use of "LOL, ROFLMAO,
FAG," relaxed grammar and spelling, and the fact that the articles were dated
"04-01-04" didn't give it away, there were still a lot of hints thrown in
everywhere.
<P>
For example, see if you can spot the clue in the URL of every article:
<P>
<CENTER><IMG SRC="http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/images/af_url.gif" WIDTH=655 HEIGHT=45></CENTER>
A Sample from MAM:
<body bgcolor="#FFFFCC" text="#993333" link="black" vlink="gray" alink="gray">



<img src="top.jpg" border="0">
<img src="mid1.jpg" border="0"><a href="main.htm"><img src="mid2.jpg" border="0"></a><a href="about.htm"><img src="mid3.jpg" border="0"></a><a href="petition.htm"><img src="mid4.jpg" border="0"></a><a href="contact.htm"><img src="mid5.jpg" border="0"></a><img src="mid6.jpg" border="0">
<img src="bottom.jpg" border="0">

Home


1/24/04 - Update: This past week I have been getting a lot of e-mails from people interested in helping me. At the moment, the best help would be to <a href="petition.htm">Sign the Petition</a>. When I have some free time at the end of this month I will organize a large group and we will start an internet protest against Maddox's website. Currently, parental blockers are not blocking his site and this is just unacceptable. If you wish to contact me about how you can make a difference, <a href="contact.htm">click here</a>.

This is the offical website of Mothers Against Maddox (MAM). The self-proclaimed <a href="http://maddox.xmission.com" target="new">"Best Page In The Universe"</a> is run by a sick, sexist, prejudice, arrogant, hateful person by the name of Maddox. His website is giving children the wrong ideas about life and the world in which we live in. The more support that MAM gains from parents, the higher chance we have to shut his awful site down.

Maddox is an extremely egotistical human being and his ego grows as the number of children that get lured into his site increase. By using twisted "humor", he tricks children into believing his hateful, biased opinions about people, the world, and life in general.

I discovered his website when I found my oldest son, age 14 looking through a <a href="http://maddox.xmission.com/suicide.html" target="new">page on his site</a> that promoted suicide. I was shocked to find out that my son had been going to this site on a constant basis. Ever since my son started going to Maddox's website, I noticed an increase in his hatred towards certain groups of people and his negative attitude towards life. I no longer allow my children to connect to the internet without my supervision, because I do not want them to view such trash on the web, that promotes hate, suicide, violence, and bad-attitude.

We must put an end to Maddox!</a>


<a href="petition.htm"><img src="right.jpg" align="right" border="0"></a>
Also of note:  While Maddox uses < P > tags to start a new paragraph, MAM uses two < br > tags.
As you can see, the two are NOT similar.  --Alexwcovington 16:27, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Technically it doesn’t matter for these purposes. Even if you sat here and made the "discovery" based on your own web development experience that is in all reality self research. Strict interpretation of convention would dictate that you published your thoughts somewhere and then hope that it gained enough acceptances for it to become accepted as "fact" and then used here. Now personally, I, as a man who has done work would think far enough to code differently. The easiest way to ensure a clean yet different appearance would be to code it in a WYSIWYG and then manually edit out all the fluff. I've done that fairly often just to make code easier to read, and in a page that size it's hardly labor intensive. Such a simple procedure would produce a much different style without too much effort.--Matt 08:30, 24 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: MAM coded by Maddox?

message: I coudln't find Ninjas mentioned anywhere in the FAQ. Soemone want to help me out. If Maddox doesn't like ninjas, my world is ruined!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 
Also anybody think we should ask to get the Che-logo available for wiki? I'll send the e-mail to Maddox if anybody seconds the motion--ZZ 00:38, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Who doesn't like ninjas? 

message: THe article seems extremely anti-Maddox.  It does little to explain why exactly he so popular - can someone not as POV as I am work on it? --Etaonish 17:40, Oct 15, 2004 (UTC)
Explain what you think is anti-Maddox. I don't see how this is anti-Maddox at all... WhisperToMe 23:39, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article isn't very favorable 

message: Why did this happen.
I would understand if all had been removed. But one was left in the article. Why did this occur?--ZayZayEM 13:13, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: If you wanna remove it, go right ahead. WhisperToMe 18:19, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removal of Posers 

message: From TBPITU, yesterday:
"Update (02-14-05): I will be making an update and an announcement some time this week."
Speculation? Do you think he's going to stop updating the site completely?? - sars 17:30, Feb 15, 2005 (UTC)
*d'uh--ZayZayEM 03:11, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Announcement" 

message: Isn't the Comic Book thing just another stupid joke. I don't think he is actually writing one.--ZayZayEM 03:11, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Comic Book

message: These don't seem to work, nor seem necessary for the article.
This article has way too many external links already, approaching on preposterous. The links to The Best Page... Homepage allow access to all contained articles, so individual articles shouldn't really get their own entry.--ZayZayEM 08:46, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Image links and more linkslashing 

message: :Taken from the old Cleanup entry…Archived by HopeSeekr of xMule (Talk) 15:39, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Old Cleanup Archive 

message: Sorry if I'm merely repeating what other people have already said, but I believe that the Lou Images section should be deleted. It adds nothing substantial to the article and a newcomer wouldn't have the faintest idea of what it's talking about. Unless anyone disagrees I will have to take the liberty of removing them myself. --cheese-cube 01:58, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: As it currently seems there are no objections to my proposal I have removed the section. --cheese-cube 08:45, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lou Images 

message: Knock-offs occupies half the article.  I think these should either be deleted or spun off into their own separate article, with a seemain tag put on it. Hbdragon88 03:59, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Separate article for spinoffs? 

message: User C303ad has been editing this page all morning to point to zenofeller.com as "the page Maddox was inspired by." User Jeffthejiff then instructed against further edits removing this. Is this assertion correct, and if so, shouldn't the article text be changed to reflect this? Or is it, as I suspect, just a bit of self-promotion / vandalism? It should also be noted that C303ad also, in a past revision, changed the link of "The Best Page in the Universe" to point to zenofeller.com. Thanks. Hrnghl
sorry, i didnt see that link. the editing all morning was about the "criticism" section which C303ad originally added as a non-npov piece. After some revert wars, i edited the piece to become NPOV. C303ad then expanded on the section, and its ok now. sorry about that link though, i didnt notice it. --Jeffthejiff | Talk 20:49, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  zenofeller.com the inspiration for Maddox? 

message: Should the wiki article mention that his website is banned in the United Arab Emirates, qutar and Saudi arabia? (not to mention websense and most other blocking software).
--ThrashedParanoid 19:07, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Blockings? 

message: I added a link to a list of hidden articles, I forgot to put this in the edit comments so I thought I'd let you guys know here —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.126.168.14 (talk • contribs) 18:59, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Added Hidden articles 

message: before he started selling shirts and possibly making a living off the site, who paid for bandwith?  With millions of hits a year, I assume that gets pretty expensive.  Just wondering if anyone knew. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Khamel83 (talk • contribs) 13:06, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: He pays for the hosting out of his own pocket, with the exception of a very small amount of unsolicited donations and whatever money he makes from his merchandise sales. He mentions this on his website somewhere, too lazy to look. -- DocSigma 03:29, 10 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I believe that would be in the FAQ or the article that talks about his site getting more hits than companies' websites. 24.185.195.4 23:53, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  does he pay for hosting the site? 

message: Okay, I just finished a major overhaul of this talk page.  Template:Unsigned deployed on most of the comments and I added the talk header.  PLEASE sign your comments with ~~~~ Hbdragon88 02:38, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup 

message: I feel too much attention is being paid to his feud with them. I'm going to call a spade a spade, this is a lame attempt by an amateurish website to leach off of Maddox's immense popularity. --02:25, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Something Awful 

message: I think the description of the site as "satirical" or "satire" should be removed. Satire is generally defined as social criticism through the exaggerated presentation of something without a self-consciousness of humor. Is the thinking that the site satirizes other sites? If he is mocking other sites' features, or strong opinions held by people in American society, he is not doing so very effectively or consistently, although the April Fools' Day gags seem more or less satirical. Maybe. I agree it is often funny, but I don't think it's satire.
:An important distinction, I would think. He insults people, spews forth venom and rhetoric, but I've read and re-read the entire archive of his site and I've found little that Maddox wrote to be satirical in nature. Is Maddox funny? Yes. Satirical? No. --203.23.157.63 14:27, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think enough of his articles are obviously satirical to call the site "satirical". Apart from the April Fools Day pages, several other articles are clearly satire - the Dr Seuss-style poem about Iraq ("Would you like to bomb Iran?") stands out. If not satire, what should we call it? "Humour" is too vague, and his topics are too broad to call it "political humour" or similar. --Malthusian (talk) 14:32, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I just checked a dictionary, and you are right. In hindsight I guess I should have pulled the dictionary out before quibbling over semantics. --203.23.157.63 17:42, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is it really satire? 

message: This paragraph: "It is estimated that at least a million people or more read Maddox's site regularly; even if a fraction of those people agreed with Maddox's political ideas, he could affect political elections. Some have even suggested that, if he was to run for office, he could gain a significant following, either due to serious or satirical voters. Maddox himself has championed a Regressive party platform and notes on his page counter that he cannot run for president until 2016."
sounds pretty dubious to me (except for the last sentence). Not all of those million people live in the United States, and of those that do, for only a very small minority will Maddox's opinions affect their vote. And the second sentence depends entirely on weasel words. I suggest replacing the paragraph with this:
"As noted above, Maddox has not declared support for any political party, and has professed active dislike for the Republican and Democrat parties on numerous occasions. He himself has championed a 'Regressive' party platform and notes on his page counter that he cannot run for president until 2016."
If no-one has any objections (or anything to support the paragraph's claims) I'll replace it myself in a few days. --Last Malthusian 20:09, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree.  United States elections rely on a pluarity of votes.  If Ralph Nader couldn't win, it will be even more difficult for an extreme person like Maddox to.  Few people actually really take Maddox seriously; his site is a satire, as Maddox has himself stated numberous times.  I think the section should be dissolved entirely, really; how is it a criticsm? - Hbdragon88 05:40, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Maddox could not affect political elections

message: I am a fan of Maddox, but I don't understand why so many people and sites always points out that his site gets more hits than McDonald's or Coke.  I understand that he doesn't advertise at all, but why would McDonald's and Coke advertise for people to go to their website?  They sell food and drinks.  IT just seems like a pointless thing to brag about and for other sites to point out.  How is it a sign of his popularity? Vash The Stampede 07:25, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Site gets more hits than _____ 

message: I didn't know much about Maddox's site, and from this Wikipedia article, I didn't really learn much right away. I went to the site, and found out quite a bit about what it is, and am starting to realize why it's so popular. There is a lot to be said here. 
I'm not sure I'm qualified to write it, but this article definitely needs some cleanup. I marked the article as cleanup until we can get the standards up to speed. There is a lot of miscellaneous information here, but nothing to the standards of an encyclopedia. There needs to be uniformity, conciseness, and everything needs to be succinct. --(talk)Jrue 01:08, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Needs intro 

message: is it just me or did their use 2 be a rant about how he hate wikipedia?--203.18.155.107 08:23, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have read the majority of Maddox's articles and I don't remember seeing a "Wikipedia Hate" article. --cheese-cube 07:52, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think I've read all of them over the years and I don't remember one either. --Malthusian (talk) 09:30, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  wikipedia hate article 

message: Is it true Maddox was murdered in Nevada late February?
-- dxt99
:Um, that seems like its a just another rumor to me. 24.185.195.4 23:46, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: He just updated his site, so no.-86.141.52.149 17:52, 15 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Maddox Dead? 

message: Has anyone else noticed a quiet revert war going on over the external link to 'The Third Best Page in the Universe'? Anons change it back and forth between http://www.thethirdbestpageintheuniverse.com and http://www.the3rdbestpageintheuniverse.com, which are two separate websites. None have left so much as an angry edit summary, let alone tried to come to a consensus.
Personally I'd be up for drawing a line in the sand and removing all of the 'fansites' and 'parodies' and keeping them out, per Wikipedia is not a web directory. They seem to me like thinly disguised links to other people's blogs that add no useful information for the reader of the article. Any thoughts? --Sam Blanning (formerly Malthusian) (talk) 23:30, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Revert war over external links 

message: The article says that Maddox would someday like to work in Bermuda, Hong Kong, or Thailand. I have never read anything about him wanting to move. Does anyone have any idea where this info came from?
:Here you go: http://www.math.utah.edu/~gustafso/5410profiles-F2002.html
:Ctrl+F for George.
::I think you should say that this was from Fall 2002, since he could have changed his mind. 71.246.111.67 04:33, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bad Info? 

message: I read that Maddox ripped off Zack Parsons of Something Awful with his children's drawings bit. Could someone offer some proof to back up whether this is correct or not? Benbenbenben 03:04, 8 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Zack Parsons

message: :In March 2005, Maddox slammed Orbitz.com for "selling me an impossible itinerary," causing rifts in the online travel booking industry.  The article and backlash against Orbitz prompted many online travel corporations to offer solutions and customer service lines to rectify mistakes in itineraries.  
Can someone put a source on this?  Any news article or anything that says that it was because of Maddox's influecne that caused this change? Hbdragon88 22:14, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Orbitz 

message: Nearly every reference comes from Maddox's own site. it would be good if there were some references from somewhere else, such as newspapers --Astrokey44 05:45, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  third party references? 

message: has repeatedly been adding a "related sites" section that has Maddox's knock-offs.  This needs to stop because it was already decided that the knock-offs caused more trouble than they were woirth.  After I asked about it, they were placed in the The Best Page in the Universe Knock Offs article, but it was unanimously deleted (see the AFD discussion).  It alsoled to a revert war over external links.  The simplest and easiest solution out of this is to simply delete them all. Hbdragon88 21:05, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Knock-offs 

message: Substituted at 15:56, 1 May 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Assessment comment