Following April Fool's Day Around The World?

Time is a funny concept, and on the Internet, this can be used to one's advantage. Take April 1st for example: just because April 1st may have ended where you are, doesn't mean that it may not be April 1st somewhere else in the world. Since this is the internet, everyone online lives in all time zones simultaneously (of course, for many of you, it's your local time zone that matters the most). So if I have the math right, this article will go live on midnight, April 2nd, 2001, in the timezone immediately east of the international date line. So I hope those of you west of Alaska and east of GMT will appreciate the extra dose of humor. With that, what were some of the better April Fool's pranks that you've experienced (or helped to create)?

Here are some other questions that were submitted along the same vein:

David the Drunk asks: "Well this year, with people being much more comftable with the internet, the bogus stories were thick and heavy. I suspect my favorite is from The Age newspaper in Australia, citing The UK Guardian in an article of some humor claiming that Superman is communist and Batman should be a terrorist. Apart from the Slashdot postings (they don't count) what else was good. Pity the Age article is dated on the 2nd, but the Guardian article is from the 1st."

...and this one from mcdade: "Being Sunday and all it wasn't a good day to pull pranks on coworkers, but i'm sure some people have some good stories out there. Mine goes something like this:

A few years back I worked at a University for a small spin-off IT group put together to implement Lotus Notes across campus. So for april fools day, the developers wrote an email with a button to "optimize" your computer, telling people to click it. It would give a bunch of random terms and junk, run a percent meter then report to the user that the computer was optimize anywhere from 1 to 1000 percent (based on random number). It did absolutely nothing, besides report back to our db who had clicked it (and how many times, yes, people were clicking it multiple times to see if they could get bet optimization). Well those that figured out that this was a joke found it refreshing, those that didn't, well they complained to IT, who inturn went to the VP.

So we were all summoned to the VP's office, figuring we were on a death march, and it turned out that he found it funny and figured that people on campus should lighten up. He even told us a story about how his daughter and her friends really got him one year.

Time for everyone else to share."

For the record, all of the Ask Slashdot's that were posted during April Fool's stretch were all actually submitted to the bin, with the names changed to protect the victi-..er...guilt...I mean, innocent parties.

Comments

Everything2 April Troll's Day

[Anonymous Coward]

The worst April Fool's joke by far was on e2, mentioned a while back in slashdot.

The e2 gods write a Perl script to convert write-ups in to l33t-speak, or backwards, and that was funny.

Then they started playing with the buttons and the XP, and that was funny.

Then they created troll accounts, and turned the chatterbox in to an AOL chat-room which was funny. For about three minutes.

Then they pretended e2 had been rooted, and while it was a little funny, people started getting seriously panicked.

Then they started flaming/impersonating users' who had left the system(respected noders in one case), which wasn't funny.

And their trolling continued for fourteen hours. Which was not funny.

As a result, at least one furious noder has left, and the reputation of the e2 Gods has become, well, a little tarnished.

Granted, it's their database, etc., but it relys on noders, and it relys on noders respecting the power structure of e2. To quote a node on the subject: "Ack! You've lost the trust of the noders!"

Posted as AC because I have an acct. with the same nick on e2, and and the e2 Gods have already displayed more than a little bad judgement when nuking write-ups.

This year's 4/1 jokes suffered terribly..

[Masem]

I've been on the net longer than most, and I know what *good* Internet-based 4/1 jokes used to be like. Unlike your typical practical joke approach that one takes in the physical world, the virtual April Fool's gag is meant to be subtle and a surprise. For example, when the Simpsons used to be good, a few of the more predominate members would put together a fake episode list for the upcoming season. Thing is, the fakes were usually never outlandish, but just had a hint of "Wow, would they take the show that far...?", so many people believed them, though the skilled reader would always be able to recognize it. The fake RFCs as well, tended to be more subtle than an obvious gag. A few years ago, all the Gamespy Planet's sites were rendered in ASCII 'due to some technical glitch', they claimed. A lot of fake but nearly-realistic news bites that spread along USENET as well.

This year was weak; Slashdot's attempts fell flat because, well, most were way too obvious (eg the Dalnet being bought by X has been done *every* year somewhere on the net). The online cartoonists didn't appear to band together this year to do much as they did in the prior two. Usenet posts that were in the 4/1 flavor were also too obvious.

I think that like how USENET and other parts of the web have suffered from the masses being introduced to it, so has the internet tradition of 4/1's. It's not some jokes were well planned, but the majority of what I saw was certainly not in the flavor of how it was done years ago.

Re:This year's 4/1 jokes suffered terribly..

[Erasmus Darwin]

Slashdot's attempts fell flat because, well, most were way too obvious

In addition to being too obvious, they were also a little too prolific. If you tell someone, in quick succession, that there's a spider on their back, aliens have just landed, and Elvis has just come out of hiding, then they aren't going to believe you when you claim something vaguely plausible, such as George W. signing an executive order mandating prayer in school as a means of dealing with school violence.

Besides, as I pointed out in this post in the "Slashdot During War?" thread, a number of the "legitimate" AskSlashdot's have been more absurd than the April Fool's Day ones.

Hell, if it weren't for the fact that the "What isn't on the Internet?" question claims "I have *never* not found anything I've searched for" (with a few exceptions), I would've pegged it as a normal, legitimate question (especially given that it got at least one serious, insightful reply here, talking about the lack of scientific papers that're available. It's just hard to peg a legitimate question with a legitimate answer as an April Fool's joke.

Superman:Red Son

[stx23]

Blockquoth Dave The Drunk:-

I suspect my favorite is from The Age newspaper in Australia, citing The UK Guardian in an article of some humor claiming that Superman is communist and Batman should be a terrorist.

Sorry, it's real. Mark Millar has been working on the Red Son storyline for what seems like several years, but it is an 'Elseworlds' tale for DC with Superman as a Communist and as mentioned, Batman as a terrorist.
Currently Millar is working on the ultraviolent Authority & Ultimate X-Men. That's a pretty elaborate April Fool.

/. doesn't do comedy - on purpose, that is

[alienmole]

The problem is that the funniest stuff on /. is always generated not by the editors, but by the participants, in reaction to real stories.

Forcing comedy is like the government issuing an edict: "This material is intended to be funny. Under section 314(d) of the Lighthearted Material Act, under penalty of imprisonment, you are now required to laugh."

I will say, though, I enjoyed the Python/Perl merger. I still think it would be a good idea!!!

I had enough =)

[matth]

Ok, One April Fools joke was funny, but then we started getting a bit out of hand, in my opinion, when like every story on slashdot was an A.F. joke *sigh* hehehe

I Overheard this One

[Mignon]

I sat next to a couple on the subway last night. There was a pause in their conversation and she said to him, "Remember when we were talking about having kids?"

"Mmm hmm..."

"Well, I sort of stopped taking the pill a few weeks ago."

"<Stammer>"

Unfortunately the train arrived at my stop and I couldn't stay to hear whether she was messing with him or not.

AFJ

[Stavr0]

I woke up sunday morning and someone had set all my clocks 1 hour back.
---

Recursive april fools joke..

[EasyTarget]

This BBC article lists some april fools from around the world.

It includes a excellent Russioan one where a news program reported that the government was to make April the 1st a National holiday to reduce inefficiences resulting from dealing with April Fools jokes. The story was, of course, a Joke.

EZ

Filtered April Fools Email...

[jburroug]

We pulled a good on my boss there. Me and the other Linux admin in our office spent the last few months cooking this one up.

We filtered all of his incoming email through a redneck filter we wrote in Perl. That is we translated all of his incoming mail from english to redneck english (ie 'computer' becomes 'new-fangled-computatin device' etc...)
What we did was write a little perl script that contained about 30 substitutions from english to redneck. We then wrote a .procmailrc that would redirect all of his incoming email through redneck.pl (and keep originals copied safely elsewhere) A root cron job was setup to swap this with his real .procmailrc at midnight april 1, and move them back at midnight april 3 (we wanted to make sure we got him on a workday too ;-> ) It worked wonderfully, I got a call this morning from the boss laughing hysterically asking me to please turn it off now.

Not a joke...

[nordicfrost]

The newspaper I work for, ran a story about taxation on food services. Basically, if you eat at the restaurant, the tax is 24% if you decide to take it with you, its' 12%. This has the funne effect that when you order a latte grande mocca etc. etc. with a lid, it's 12% tax. Without a lid it's 24% tax. 79% of the people taking the poll on sunday voted "April fool?" in a web poll...

It wasn't!

NT does have some usefulness (April Fool's Tale)

[wcspxyx]

I did this one last year.

I was working at a large company in their web development group. They had a small server farm that the web group used for testing new stuff and for new development. I was not really in charge of the farm, but people would always come and bug me when they needed help with it. The servers were almost entirely NT.

SysInternals has this really spiffy NT screensaver that looks like the WinNT BSOD, along with a fake reboot, which will then go into a fake disk check, which finds fake errors, and repeats. So, the night before, I wrote a little script that made the BSOD screensaver the default on all of the servers.

The next morning, people kept coming to my cube and...

PERSON: All the servers crashed!!!!
ME: Really? (clickity clickity) I can still ping them. Are you sure they're dead?
PERSON: They look dead. I'll go look again.
Minutes later...
PERSON: Really! All of them! BSOD!
ME: ROFL

I caught 3 different people that morning.

April 1st? Not everywhere

[Therlin]

April Fool's is not on April 1st everywhere in the world. It many countries it is called "innocent's day" which is on December 28th. And I am sure that other countries celebrate it on different days. So for some of these people, reading these odd news on April 1st makes absolutely no sense and it may take them a while to realize that they are not for real.

Not everyone has a sense of Humour

[tubs]

The bank of England told one bank that it couldn't go ahead with thier April fools stunt.

Basically the banks web site was going to have an online ATM that printed money, so that really lazy people didn't have to go to the hole in the wall.

Money coming out of your printer .... I wonder how many people would have tried it - I know I would have :-)

Innocent's Day

[doctor_oktagon]

It many countries it is called "innocent's day"

The definition of "innocent's day" on slashdot should be updated to read:

Innocent's Day: the first time a newcomer clicks on the g0atse link from behind his corporate websweeper proxy"

Doh!!

What about gaim's April Fool's joke??

[Pentagon13]

Head on over to http://gaim.sourceforge.net/ and tell me that isn't one of the sickest April Fools Jokes of the day. It had me fooled immediately, until about half an hour later when I was rereading it more carefully that I realized it could all be a prank. It just seemed weird that Mark and Rob would pack up and go work for the enemy.

So is it a joke or not?!?

"Well, your story seems very compelling, Mr. Jackass, I mean, uh, Simpson. So I'll just type it up on my invisible typewriter. Dum dee dum dum." -- Chief Wiggum

Campaign Finance Reform -elaborate prank on McCain

[tenzig_112]

Ever wonder how campaign finance reform has gotten this far? Both parties see the legislation as a threat to incumbency, so what gives?

This morning as Senators assembled in the chamber, somebody yelled out "April Fools!" and John McCain burst into tears. He knew at once what had happened. A vast conspiracy of 100 senators and 400+ house members worked dilligently to keep him in the dark, all the while adding amendments to ensure the bill's unconstitutionality (i.e. harmlessness).

The full story can be found here.

Tobacco Industry April Fools

[Trivial Sublime]

A company called "truth" (no joke) ran an ad on several major networks (quicktime movie here) with a "tobacco industry spokesperson" on it, saying that every cigarette had been recalled due to "health concerns" and that cigarettes would not be back on the shelves until there were absolutely no health risks..."because if there's two things the tobacco industry cares about, it's your health, and your trust. Thank you." The ad then flashed "april fool's" and the URL.

stop your bitching

[deran9ed]

I've actually caught many people aside from the typical April fools pranks. Using obfuscated URL's I've spoofed everything from Slashdot, ABCnews, Napster, CNET, Republican National Committe, and others.

Aside from the typical Slashdotter, or other geek for that matter, I've managed to fool many people into thinking these some of the things were real.

So slashdot went a little overboard for one day... So what?! Its one day out of the year where anyone can be silly just as you were when you were a kid telling someone his shoe was untied then yelling APRIL FOOLS! Get a grip and stop bitching if April fools pranks offended you, its one day out of the year, and no one was hurt by it. (well maybe someone precious ego)

For X-rist's sake, just stop it !!!

[GreenEggsAndHam]

The whole idea of an April fool's prank is to hide it among other *true* news items and make it so *nearly* credible that people will get caught out. The Slashdot "editors" couldn't have shown what a childish bunch of idiots they are any better if they'd *tried*. So, to show how funny you guys are and what a wonderful sense of humour you have you decide that you're gonna give us a special gift : on April 1st *every* *single* article on /. for the last 48 hrs has been utter tripe. And now here you are just rubbing it in : "Haha ! by playing on the time zones we can extend April 1st to a 48 hours day, haha ! We rule !" Now you've got a year to go away and figure what makes an April fool's joke *good*. It's gonna be hard but 364 days may just be enough. Get clue or grow up.