How to navigate snopes.com

Administrative features are located in a 13-item menu bar that appears above the category icons.

The site's 2,000-plus articles are sorted into a variety of categories linked to from our main page. These
categories appear as icons described to their right by words or short phrases. Depending on the size of the category, clicking on the icon or short descriptive phrase takes you to a list of articles contained in that section or to a directory of its sub-categories. Therefore, if you were looking for accounts of unusual deaths, you would first click on Horrors and then on Freakish Fatalities to take you into that section, because the Horrors category was large enough that it needed to be subdivided, whereas if you were interested in tales about lotteries, a click on the Luck icon would transport you directly to the applicable list of articles.

You'll find an array of navigation buttons at the bottom of each interior page. (Look to the base of this one, for example). Although some of these buttons differ from section to section, no matter where you are in snopes.com, one of them will give you instant access to our Search Engine and another the ability to send us notes or inquire about rumors you've heard via our Send Comments feature. There are two ways to return to the
main page — if you're at the top of the page, click the "snopes.com" brand to the left of the page's title; if at the bottom, click the "Urban Legends Reference Pages" logo (the moving magnifying glass).

Want the skinny on the wild story your co-worker was spouting? Looking for the truth behind the latest scary Internet forward? Been nagged forever by a silly belief your grandmother swore by? Then comb this site using our Search Engine. Hint: We find the most accurate results are gained by searches keyed to one or two words specific to the item being looked for, such as "aspartame" or "cookie recipe." Avoid keying your searches to the titles of pieces or the purported names of the senders because these details tend to shift from one telling to the next, meaning your hunt is likely to be less than successful.

If your interest primarily lies in viewing only the new items added to the site in the last two months, our What's New page is the place for you. As new articles are added to snopes.com, they get listed there, most recent at the top.

Especially for visitors who have been here once or twice and who would like to look around further but have no real idea where to start, the Randomizer is a godsend. Clicking it will take you to one randomly-selected article after another — there's no order or organization to it, making a session with the randomizer an entertaining way to spend a lunch hour.

Our Top Searches page presents a list of direct links to the stories we're being asked about most often of late.

We offer two mailing lists: an update list and a discussion list. As a visitor to snopes.com, you can become a member of none, one, or both — whichever best suits your needs.

Our update list provides a once-a-week mailing detailing the latest articles added to the site — think of it as a What's New page sent to you every Friday. It is a "announcement only" list, which means its members receive only the one e-mail a week, with that sent by the list's moderator. These updates are available in both HTML (bells and whistles) and non-HTML (text only) formats.

Our discussion list brings together a diverse group intent upon talking about urban legends and all manner of other oddities. This is a high-traffic list, so those who subscribe should not expect to see the bottoms of their inboxes for a very long time.

Information on how to subscribe to both these lists is available on our Mailing Lists page.

Hidden under the innocuous Message Boards icon from the main page is a thriving online community of thousands intent upon talking about everything conceivable. Feel free to read the boards without participating or become a member yourself so you can add your views to whatever is up for discussion. The language is clean and the natives are friendly, but beware of forums marked NFBSK if you are easily offended.

Our FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) provides answers to many of the most common questions, including what constitutes an urban legend.

We use a number of odd words on this site, such as ostension and glurge. Our glossary will help you make sense of these unusual terms.

Two of our most popular pages can now be accessed via RSS feed: our What's New and Top Searches pages. The appropriate URLs are https://www.snopes.com/info/whatsnew.rss and https://www.snopes.com/info/topsearches.rss

We describe a variety of folklore-related books and link to places where they can be purchased through our Books page. If you've ever thought to get a friend a book about urban legends or strange facts, this section will provide you with many great suggestions.

Our privacy statement explains that we neither collect information about our visitors nor share their e-mail addresses with anyone else.

As you move about the site, you'll notice entries on the various index pages within each section are festooned with colored balls. A short key to their meanings is given on each index page (green=true, red=false, yellow=undetermined, white=unverifiable), but an expanded key is also available.