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

And?

[NetJunkie]

Most Easter Eggs are things people might stumble upon...but appending words and parameters on to URLs isn't something I would find. How do you expect anyone except yourself to see these?

Re:And?

[Laser_47]

How do you "stumble" across the flight simator in Excel? I've never had the need to do those things on a spreadsheet. The programmers had to tell someone in order to find it.

Until you get arrested

[papasui]

For attempts to compromise the security of the server while you are trying to find Easter eggs.

Re:Until you get arrested

[Cutriss]

For reference...2002-03-19 20:37:21 Easter Eggs at the Expense of Resources? (askslashdot,programming) (rejected)

That just got rejected in the last three days.

My comments went something like this - I have a friend who works for a company that does Palm software, and he inserted a tic-tac-toe game in their application. The software he develops is fairly large and robust, and the thought came to mind: Where do you draw the line with Easter Eggs?

The Palm platform, and any other portable/embedded system, deals with small storage and memory footprints. Adding in a hidden extra like this isn't taking up an "infinitesmal" amount of space or resources. Proportionally, it's of significant size. On a PC, this might be different, but for a Palm with 2 MB of memory, I'd personally be a bit disappointed to find out that the software I'm installing is artificially fluffed/bloated because some yahoo decided to have a little fun.

So, where do you draw the line with Easter Eggs? Fun in programming is cool. And I'm not saying that he was wrong for doing it...but what if he decided to put in JezzBall or something larger instead? Or something that wound up being a security/system hazard?

Re:easter eggs can be for debugging too

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the easter eggs I ever programmed were for debugging purposes, like having undocumented debug modes. Many game developers have invincible modes so they can test the game, jump to different parts of the game, test all the different scenerios.

Re:easter eggs are stupid!

[DJPsychoChild]

not a flame: This comment brings up a common misconception: Easter Egg development wastes time. Some of the better Easter Eggs are put in after the code has been approved, before it's released. This ensures that it gets in, and doesn't change the debug time at all. Also, as a programmer, Easter Eggs help me feel better about what I release: if I'm going to spend months to years on a project, I want at least a little bit of my personality to show up in it, even if it is in a hard to find place. Anyone else feel the same?

Not an Easter Egg

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything you can reach through obvious links, starting from the home page, isn't really a hidden "Easter Egg", is it?

(Even the Google funny languages like Klingon and Hacker are listed on the Language Tools page...)

Hidden Easter eggs = Bad, Bad.

[Smarmy_1]

I've helped create a number of easter eggs in the past, but these days, I've had a serious change in thinking about them.

This may sound extreme, but if a coder added an easter egg to a project that I was running, they would get in serious trouble, maybe even fired. Now, before you think that is just being too serious or flame-bait, here's my reasoning:

Simply put, easter eggs are for the developers, not for the customers, and they don't belong in commericial software developement. The risk almost always outweighs the benefits, especially in a project like a public site! That is incredibly dangerous.

One of the biggest problems with easter eggs is they almost always bypass the QA process. Think about that for a minute. The developers are writing code that hasn't been tested, and the QA department doesn't even know it exists! Granted, this isn't always true, but most of the time, it is. Bad, bad. Like potentially company-ruining-bad if the dev uses some bad judgement (gee, that never happens, late at night, at the end of a project, does it?).

The best course of action is that the devs know ahead of time that easter eggs are not tolerated unless they are totally above-board in the development cycle. Save your humorous inside jokes for internal little apps you give to your mates, and you and your company will be a lot better off. They're usually inside jokes, anyways, so putting them in a public software project is just a totally unecessary risk, IMO. A few yuk-yuks is not worth your company or your project being compromised by bad code or a PR hit from an embarassing easter egg.

Re:Hidden Easter eggs = Bad, Bad.

[anticypher]

Hey, I had an old room mate who formally placed easter eggs into some (maybe all) of his projects.

He was a project manager for a large "internet products" company, designing and building large software projects. Early on in the process, he would get the programmers and QA and other creative types together over beers when there were no other managers around. He would then ask them if they wanted to put an easter egg into the project. The answer was always Yes!, so they would come up with a secret code name for the module, and then QA would be able to test it, project leaders could review it, and the module name would exist from the very first sign-off by managers. Since they basically followed an "extreme programming" style, writing out the test cases and specifics of each function before coding, some slight obfuscation would occur around the eggs exact function. He'd then place a rule that the easter egg module couldn't be coded until 90% of the other code was finished, but the programmers would all have modules coded in advance waiting for the 90% day.

When the easter eggs were all ready, they would all vote for the best (or best two) and put that into the code. Then the QA people could also write test cases around the trigger code, to make sure the easter eggs did exactly what they were supposed to do, and nothing more. Usually they also had a secret credits page, since the company would never allow former employees to tell which projects they worked on (because they now outsource most of their projects to India, VietNam and China and the idiotic^Wpatriotic american customers wouldn't understand).

Because of this, liability of the programmers and the project management team would be negated. The original design specs would contain the easter egg code, just under a name that looked like all the other modules. Just in case the lawyers came after them later, but I've never heard of it happening.

the AC

Re:Expunging the Past

[BrookHarty]

Theres a post about people putting easter eggs in thier code, so they can have proof they did the work. If a company lies about you not doing the work, thats slander. Offering a "Credits List" makes them 100% responsible for keeping it accurate, even if people leave the company.

Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it. - Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks, 1965

Re:I've done this before for copyright reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

Right - and your new clients think, "Gee will he hide crap in my application too?"

Re:easter eggs ARE stupid!

[GoogolPlexPlex]

You add code to your release *after* it has been approved (by some quality assurance ppl, I assume)?? That's an incredibly unprofessional thing to do. *Any* changes to executable code have the potential to reveal bugs that were lurking in the code, but didn't have the right conditions to be expressed. This is part of the reason why most PC games have cheat codes - the programmers put them in so that the software testers can quickly create test cases (without needing to play the game for hours to get $1M gold or whatever). But the cheat codes are left in, because if they were removed, then the executable that ends up being released is not the same one that was tested.