One of the brightest lights on the internet is in danger of being snuffed out: Snopes, the website that brought fact-checking to the web, is facing the prospect of losing all its advertising revenue due to a painful legal battle that ultimately stems from the co-founders’ divorce two years ago.

It would be an ignominious end for a website which has survived more than two decades online, outlasting boom, bust and boom again, before finding a new lease of life, and widespread respect, in the era of “fake news”.

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The site was originally founded in 1995, by David and Barbara Mikkelson, as an offshoot of David’s interest in urban legends and folklore. Its name, a reference to the works of William Falkner, was his handle on the usenet group (a text-only online forum from the pre-web days) alt.folklore.urban, where he engaged in discussions about the topic.

From there, the pair spun up the site to act as a repository of all their investigations – although you won’t find Barbara in the official histories any more. She left the site around the same time the couple divorced, selling her half of the firm to the company, Proper Media, which provided advertising and development services for Snopes. It’s that split ownership which has now left the company in a quagmire, with the two firms falling out and David Mikkelson since attempting to cancel their arrangement. It is, to use a legal term, a mess.

In its early days, Snopes focused on classical urban legends – stories of people found dead in locked hotel rooms, strange creatures prowling sewers, and so on. But as time went on, it found a new niche: the legends of the internet itself. By the mid 2000s, you could guarantee that if you received an email with more than about five “Fwd”s in the subject line, its contents would have been discussed on Snopes at some point, and either proved true, with links to reputable news sources and a fuller explanation of what occurred, or declared false. Not that that ever really stopped the myths being spread.

By 2008, the shift from offline rumours to online myths had come full-circle: falsehoods told online were every bit as important as those told in “real life”. The site had been analysing tales of all sorts for years, of course, but with the experience of the 2008 election – and knowledge of just how many lies started flying around once the US gained its first African-American president – the gaze fell on Snopes. Was it as neutral as it seemed? Could it really be trusted to tell the world what was true and false?

The answer, thankfully, seems to be yes. The Mikkelsons were apolitical to a fault: David a registered independent, Barbara a Canadian citizen. Political fact-checking site FactCheck.org declared their work “solid and well-documented”, in the process of – ironically – fact-checking a viral email which claimed that Snopes was deliberately attacking stories produced by opponents of Barack Obama.

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The 2016 election was always going to catapult Snopes into the limelight. It was expected, of course, that the online realm would be the location of ever more campaigning, analysis and reporting, but the rise of “fake news” – first as a thing to note, then as an actual electoral topic in its own right – seemed tailor-made for Snopes to tackle. In the aftermath, the site, which has grown to 11 full-time editorial staff, has been tapped by Facebook as one of its approved fact-checking groups, given the ability to mark stories on the site as “true” or “false” in an effort to stop junk spreading virally.

But the attention has also started to highlight the cracks in the model. When debunking a story involves following a trail of links back to an obviously hoax site, doing the legwork that overworked reporters at viral news sites don’t, Snopes excels; but when it comes to tackling original reporting, shared in a slanted way by a hyper-partisan news organisation, the site is less well-equipped to fight back.

Even so, Snopes has to survive. It has become one of those foundational aspects of the web, like Wikipedia or Google Maps, which it’s impossible to imagine gone. Could we survive without it? Partially True.