Easter Eggs in Web Sites?

cwikla asks: "Back in the .COM days, I worked at eGroups, now owned by a larger Company. During my time I added a couple of easter eggs to the site, which I was reminded of while watching Being John Malkovich this weekend. I checked, and ones sort of still there. If you append malkovich=1 to a message URL it would turn the message into 'malkovich' mode. It sort of still works, but over time I guess the code has been a changin' so it's kind of spotty. Oh, there are others that still are in there, but where's the fun of telling all the secrets? Any other folks done anything equivalent, especially on mainstream sites?"

Comments

Yoda

[Gabey]

At the College of Business site I develop for, we used to use a picture of Yoda to scare the folks who wouldn't let us take their pictures. Seems as though most of them prefer a picture of themselves (no matter how horrible they may think it is) to one of Yoda attached to their bios.
In any case, changing the bio's email tag to "yoda" gives the visitor Yoda's (short) bio. There are a few others, but seeing as how nobody has found any of them yet, we gave up on adding them for our own amusement.

-Gabe

Re:Slashdot.org easter-egg

[cswiii]

Funny, all I got was an alert, "This document contains no data."

Slashdot Easter Egg

[big.ears]

Here's one you can find on slashdot: If your comment consists entirely of "First Post", you get modded down to -1.

Re:Slashdot Easter Egg

[fobbman]

And if you post an article as JonKatz it magically won't show up on 90% of Slashdot readers front pages.

.

GoatSe.CX

[clinko]

For "Security" on a friends site he has it redirect to goatse.cx if you try to change strings.

I learned my lesson. I don't try to fuck with his site anymore.

easter egg clients

[brer_rabbit]

I swear my server doesn't have easter eggs, but that doesn't stop some people from trying:

"GET /scripts/..%255c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c +dir HTTP/1.0"
"GET /_vti_bin/..%255c../..%255c../..%255c../winnt/sys tem32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0"
"GET /_mem_bin/..%255c../..%255c../..%255c../winnt/sys tem32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0"
"GET /msadc/..%255c../..%255c../..%255c/..%c1%1c../..% c1%1c../..%c1%1c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0"
"GET /scripts/..%c1%1c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0"

Re:easter egg clients

[Quai]

Like this one?

Resume` in Code

[RembrandtX]

When I Decided to leave Comcast@Home I put my resume in the template source code as comments.
[Just in case I needed to prove to potential employers that I was what I said I was.]

It was there for about 3 months before someone caught it.

Oddly enough .. no crank calls .. even for having my phone number out there 'obtainable' as it were.

Eudora had my resume in it

[Wee]

I don't know if this is an Easter Egg, but I built a version of Eudora (it was like the tenth daily build and really late at night on a weekend when I had plans or something -- in other words, typical Qualcomm) which displayed my resume instead of the readme. Heh. Never told anyone that. Nobody reads the release notes anyway.

Oh yeah, when Eudora moved to adware mode and went public beta, me and a guy from tech support put in some ads of our own (accessible only to a small range of IPs, though). We had a Russian brides one, some personal lube ads, Gary Coleman, the usual. We used most of them for testing during the private beta, but one we did add was a picture of a former VP who played a large part in causing the ruination of the Eudora group. It wasn't a flattering ad, and predictably it didn't rotate for very long, but it got seen.

Ahh, the memories...

-B

HTTP header

[lampwick]

One of the sites that I wrote about 7 years ago included this HTTP header line in every response it sent out:

X-Urban-Legend: There's lots of hidden information in HTTP headers.

Marvin the Paranoid Android 404 takeoff

[tevita]

Loved the 404 at http://www.sweweb.net/

Try http://www.sweweb.net/garbage.html for instance.

Re:seti@home easter egg

[totallygeek]

Not really a Seti@home easter egg, but funny story none-the-less:

A good friend of mine was sshing to another computer to run seti and it finally got noticed (why is this computer running sluggish?). So, this other guy went to my friend to ask a question and saw that he was watching the seti processes going on about 20 computers. So, he went back to his machine and wrote a program outputting stuff just like seti@home and at the end came up with a message saying something was found and he should call this 800 number immediately. Once it was ready, he rebooted (killing my friend's ssh session) and now the replacement seti was ready to go. So, my friend logs in and runs seti. All is well, and then everyone hears, "Oh my God". He is calling everyone around his computer so that he can speakerphone the historic phone call giving fame and fortune for finding E.T. Click, dial tone, beep, beep....beep, ring, ring -- It was so funny to see his face when it was a sex line number, and not SETI.

Moral: don't jack with others' resources.

Re:Slashdot Egg

[kliklik]

How about http://warez.slashdot.org/?

Al Gore's campaign web site

[mikosullivan]

Al Gore's campaign web site for the 2000 election contained some special remarks in comments in the HTML. Basically, Al falls all over himself congratulating you on how smart you are for viewing the source:

Thanks for checking out our source code! I plan to use this space to post special messages to those who are helping to improve our web site -- by making our site the best it can be. The fact that you are peeking behind the scenes at our site means you can make an important difference to this Internet effort. I'm grateful for your help and support in this campaign. Now let's keep working to build the 21st Century of our dreams!

Al Gore

Re:seti@home easter egg

[Anonvmous Coward]

Heh I love pranks like that.

My company asked me to put a demo of our technology up on our website. So I created a blank web page with a windows error message in the center that read: "The radiation shielding on your monitor has failed, please do not sit directly in front of your computer."

Then, I did something really sneaky: Using FrontPage (there really is a use for it :P) I downloaded a CNN Health page and wrote up a fictional health warning about the 'Microwave Virus'. Heh It was a silly idea: A virus floats around people's machines and increases the power of UV guns in your monitor by 400%. Eventually it burns out some of the shielding and exposes people to radiation. Common symptoms included drowsiness, irritability, and other stuff you typically feel at work.

I renamed my computer on the network to 'www.cnn-news.com' and set up MS's Personal Web server on my computer to host that fake web page I created. Except for the domain, the URL looked exactly like one of CNN's pages. I even corrected all the links to go to other areas of CNN's site. (It seems like a lot of trouble, but like I said, FrontPage made it real easy.) Of course, I sent out a 'virus advisory'.... Anybody on our network was able to visit 'www.cnn-news.com' (with the address stuff at the end) to hit that page.

So what happened was first a few people opened my message about the new demo, and they got the 'Radiation Shielding has Failed' message. They ignored that (they work too hard), then they read my advisory of the 'Microwave Virus' and put the two together.

When I got to work, several of the women in the office were standing around asking each other if they should go to their doctor. The System Administrator about died laughing when I let him on it. (He had to put up with strange questions about radiation shielding all morning. Heh.)

Not sure if that quite qualifies as an easter egg, but a fun story nonetheless. :)