Admit it. You clicked here first, didn't you?

There aren't any links on this page, because I don't intend to give the perpetrators mentioned here any free traffic by providing links to their sites. I'll name the sites, and you can look them up if you want to take the trouble. But the following are websites I refuse to link because, quite simply, they're thieves. Each one uses material stolen from other websites without permission and usually without attribution.

Enter the Shadows. Stolen material from my website; jumble of realvamp and RPG information mixed together.

Eternal Darkness: the World Beyond. Rips off my original "Real Vampires" article with inserted remarks of her own stuck in here and there to make it sound like she wrote the article.

The National Vampire Association. Reprints a section of my FAQ without attribution or permission, and some of their other material seems awfully familiar.

Ravensorrow.com. Promotes herself as "the largest vampire database online" -- of stolen material. She does attribute the authors, but claims that she can't provide linkbacks to the sources because there's too much material to document. Reprints my paper on the Greek vrykolakas without permission, and in defiance of the statement on my Rare Article Archive page asking people not to steal the articles. To add insult to injury, she only reprints half the article! It's broken into two parts, and she only got the first part!

Vampires in the Modern Era (formerly Virtual Vampires). Uses a graphic for wallpaper that is actually the original and highly copyrighted cover art, by artist Vito de Vito, from P.N. Elrod's Bloodlist (Berkley, 1990). All the links are outdated so I think this site is long abandoned.

Other Reasons I Won't Link Sites

If I come across a link to a vampire-themed website, I check it out. But I only link websites that seem to be worth the effort of clicking the mouse to get there. I reject sites for reasons including but not limited to the following problems:

• Website appears to be long abandoned and moribund, according to clues such as:
  • Last "updated" date is several years old
  • External links are outdated
  • Site is deteriorating internally, with broken links, missing graphics, expired guest book, etc
  • Site has "coming events" for several years ago
  • Site has lots of "under construction" or "coming soon" notices that seem to have been there a long time
• Website contains little substantive content, and what there is rehashes the same information available on lots of other sites
• Website is very poorly designed (one long unending page crammed with banners, web rings, buttons, blinkies, random photos, etc ad nauseum...). This isn't the same thing as a very simple and spare design. Good content doesn't need to be gussied up--it just looks better that way. Bad content only looks worse in neon and Day-glo.
• Website plays music. I hate websites that play music and generally speaking, only the bad ones do. I'll let this one pass if and only if the rest of the website is unusually good. But I detest having to turn the mute on to read a site.
• Website is basically a personal home page, or a page for a specific offline group with no information of general interest.
• Website is about an organization or group that no longer exists.
• Website is password protected, and requires registration and log-in to access anything past the portal. What would be the point of linking it?
• In the case of messageboards, if there haven't been any posts for more than a year, I won't bother linking it. Who wants to join a messageboard just to listen to the crickets chirping?