April Fools Wrap Up

Thanks for the usual April Fools Day flame- every year people fall for it. It never ceases to amaze me how angry and venomous, yet utterly clueless a few people can be despite the blatant obviousness of the joke. Lastly, jfengel sent us the annual April Fools RFC: RFC3251 describes "Electricity over IP" and RFC3252 on "Binary Lexical Octet Ad-hoc Transport" reformulates IP to work over XML."

Comments

You've completely missed the point....

[Masem]

Scroll back to 1995, or the like. Good April's Fool jokes on the net were subtly masked along with real news or announcements, such as the IP over Avain RFC. The idea is that as you read through the group, you'd see real posts, and then a post that seems odd, weird, or out of place; at that point, you'd have people falling for it and otherwise responding negatively towards it until you give the user a subtle hint to check the date.

Today, every story you posted was fake. There was no subtly. In addition, there was little originality; most of what's posted has been done already in one form or another. One subtle 4-1 joke, such as the advertized story of the day at /. , would have been good. Having a Slashback with a summary of 4-1 jokes around the web including the Google one and the Debian one would have been a nice evening wrapup. But having every single story for a 24hr period as fake is not funny, particularly *if* certain real stories happened today (I didn't see any, so consider yourself lucky).

Next time, take it easy. Make it subtle and find something that you *know* will get a humor-filled response by those that don't read the story, and you'll get much fewer flames and many more smiles.