Wikipedia Covers April Fool's Hoaxes

vladd_rom writes "Wikipedia maintains an up to date list with April Fools hoaxes from this year. The list already includes hundreds of entries. Among the most popular, one could find Google Romance, a new Google.com project, Google Browser, as well as Yahoo!'s desire to buy all Web 2.0 companies on the web. However, it seems that this year hoaxes will be more interconnected: the wiki page already includes some websites that announced that they have been bought by Yahoo!, and linked to Yahoo!'s blog post from their pages."

Comments

It's obvious

[eclectro]

Chuck Norris rides horses, not ponies. He kicked slashdot so hard that it turned green.

Re:It's obvious

[earnest murderer]

Speaking of...

I move that the "ponies" tag supersede the "bullshit" and "gay" tags.

Noooo!

[tgtanman]

Where'd my pink ponies go ?!?

All is well again....

[1053r]

I think that "pink ponies" is perhaps the most annoying april fool's joke I have seen on the net so far...

And by the way, I posted this already

/. April Fools Jokes

[HillBilly]

Get worse every year and get taken to far to the point where the site is unuable for a day. Have one good joke and thats it, don't screw up the user experience.

Still pink?

[brian0918]

Is the color scheme still pink, or did we switch back to the green? I shouldn't have clawed my eyes out...

At least my typing skills are still omysvl//////

Re:Still pink?

[cgenman]

You didn't claw your eyes out in vain: there is still the IT color scheme.

Get Your Pink Ponies Here

[dduardo]

Pink Pony CSS

Re:Get Your Pink Ponies Here

[sahrss]

.jar file

For FF 1.5 with Slashdotter 1.2.2 extension. Adds functionality for:

<3 OMG!!! PONIES!!! <3

Copy it to replace the one used by the Slashdotter extension in your FF profile files (for Windows users, that's in your Documents and Settings folder.)

Thanks God it's over...

[fm6]

... that pink was hurting my eyes. Then again, it was a convenient reminder that there was nothing worth bothering with on Slashdot for the last 24 hours.

I used to love April Fools hoaxes, but it's become lame. Attention! A HOAX IS NOT FUNNY WHEN EVERYBODY KNOWS IN ADVANCE IT'S A HOAX!!!! If you want to do an April Fool hoax, make at least a token effort to suprise your audience. Like this email, which got delivered to every employee of a certain large hitech company this morning:

TO: U.S. Employees
FROM: Global Employee Name Management
DATE: April 1, 2006
CONTACT: Name Management x94678 (WHO-R-U)
ACTION: Please read.

This bulletin contains important information about your name.

Overview

XXXX has long had a requirement that every UNIX username inside XXXX be
unique. The transition to these globally unique usernames was at times
painful, but the result has been that XXXX has been able to support a
level of global operation that is unprecedented.

It is now time to take that process to its next logical step: Ensuring
that employees' names are unique.

Employees with duplicated names represent immeasurable opportunities
for confusion, wasted time, and security breaches. In the interests of
improving the efficiency of the company, we are embarking on an
ambitious effort to improve this situation by making employees' names
globally unique.

Implementation

In the first phase, to be implemented between today and April 1, 2007,
approximately 800 employees with duplicated first and last names will
be renamed to eliminate the duplication. At the completion of this
phase, it will be possible to uniquely refer to any XXXX employee using
the employee's first and last name.

In the second phase, to be implemented between April 1, 2007 and April
1, 2008, approximately 20,000 employees with duplicated first names and
last initials will be renamed to eliminate the duplication. At the
completion of this phase, it will be possible to uniquely refer to any
XXXX employee using the employee's first name and last initial. In
addition to the obvious convenience improvement involved, substantial
savings are expected through eliminating printing the full last name on
various internal documents. The ink required to print a typical name
will be cut in half!

In the third phase, to be implemented between April 1, 2008 and April
1, 2009, all employees at the Vice President level and above will be
renamed so that their first and last initials are unique. Employees at
the E/Z-10 level will be renamed so that their first, middle, and last
initials are unique. In addition, in each Director-level group and
each building, all employees will be renamed so that their first,
middle, and last initials are unique. At the conclusion of this phase,
it will be possible to refer to any highly visible employee using only
two or three letters, and to any employee in a particular organization
or physical location using only three letters. In the vast majority of
cases, use of initials should be sufficient to identify an employee.

New Employees

New employees will be required to conform to the naming requirements in
effect on their start date. If required to pick a new name, they will
be encouraged to take the future naming requirements into account in
their choice.

Conflict Resolution

In general, the employee with the lower badge number will retain the
original name, and those employees with higher badge numbers will be
renamed. The employee will be allowed to choose a new name, but if the
employee is not able to decide on a suitable name before the deadline,
a new name will be assigned in consultation with the employee's
manager.

I immediately fired back a letter pointing out that it would be more efficient to simply fire employees with non-unique names. Of course, I didn't remind them that I have a long, unusual name...

Worst - April - Fools - ever....

[Andy Gardner]

Seriously what the hell just happened. Since when has april fools day been about making a fool of yourself?

Where was that single hoax among the serious articles that sucked you in, until you did the double-take and realise you'd been 'had'? I expected something intelligent from /., something subtle. Instead we got 3000 comments about PONIES.

For shame /.

Re:Worst - April - Fools - ever....

[technoextreme]

Seriously what the hell just happened. Since when has april fools day been about making a fool of yourself?

Well according to wikipedia after 12:00PM in some countries a person that pulls an April Fools joke is actually considered the fool.

Where was that single hoax among the serious articles that sucked you in, until you did the double-take and realise you'd been 'had'? I expected something intelligent from /., something subtle. Instead we got 3000 comments about PONIES.

You see the joke itself was very very subtle. Slashdot make you think for 365 days in the year that the userbase is capable of sane and insightful discussion. Today just shows us that assumption is wrong.

Next april fools

[BkBen7]

we should give everyone mod points for the whole day.

Re:Next april fools

[techno-vampire]

No. We should tell everybody they have mod points, but if they don't really have them, they get an April Fools page when they try to use them.

Unfortunately,you belong to the addict demographic

[physicsphairy]

Let's face it, anyone who finds themselves personally antagonized by Slashdot's non-serious antics is an addict. CmdrTaco could stomp on your toes and give you a wedgie and you'd still be coming back.

Those of us who do not take Slashdot so seriously, however, shall either be amused or indifferent, and very unlikely irked.

You suffer from the same problems of the Democratic/Republican bases--sure their leaders keep screwing them over, even they're the ones who put them in office, but their unwillingness to vote for someone else is precisely why the voting blocks will always be ignored by those they vote for.

Re:Google Romance

[BkBen7]

/me remembers that gmail was an april fools joke too......


Ya never know...

Worst ever April disaster

[daniel23]

with that evil color scheme and having to disable the foolish css after every reload or link I quit my fav pretense of being busy entirely.
Which in fact raised my productivity but looking at the number of comments I feel I wasnt the only one to do so.
What about taking /. offline next year? April fooling the DNS or something?

A Hoax!?!

[ArikTheRed]

Wait... so I shouldn't have registered boycottyahoofortakingovertheweb.org? Damnit!

Re:Back to Green

[Kethinov]

Alas ye olde pinkdot, we barely knew ye. Return unto us hither in a better life, anew.

Regarding tagging...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just noticed this as it occured for this story. When the tags are clearly wrong, it should be possible to vote them negatively. For example, -gay would score down the tag and, hopefully would eventually disappear.

Re:Regarding tagging...

[Sigma 7]

Prepend a '!' - this is the equivalent of negating a tag.

At least someone has a sense of humor

[Infonaut]

Alas ye olde pinkdot, we barely knew ye. Return unto us hither in a better life, anew.

I laughed out loud when I read that one.

After reading the vitriolic posts on Slashdot today, you'd think someone had pissed in everyone's Wheaties. It's just April Fool's Day. The editors of Slashdot wanted to have some fun. They do a great job of providing geek fodder 365 days a year, and this is the one day of the year they get to goof off. Maybe it could have been done better. Maybe it could have been done worse. Still, I don't really understand why everyone has become so unhinged.

The site is FREE, and unless you're in a really bad domestic situation, nobody is pointing a gun at your head, forcing you to read Slashdot. If the site makes you go into a homicidal rage every April Fool's Day, get stoned, sit in a corner, and don't point your browser at Slashdot for 24 hours. Better yet, come up with some witty responses like Kethinov's, rather than all of this foaming at the mouth, all caps nonsense. Nothing is more ludicrous than reading some mouth-breather's spelling-deprived, syntax-challenged account of how fucked up Slashdot gets on April Fool's Day.

Re:At least someone has a sense of humor

[petermgreen]

personally i wasn't too bothered about the fact it was a joke skin, i was bothered that it made links virtually unreadable (even worse than the it.slashdot.org skin).

Re:At least someone has a sense of humor

[Andy Gardner]

Maybe it could have been done better. Maybe it could have been done worse.

Maybe it could have been done funny

Re:Google Romance

[Zarel]

Well, GMail didn't say this:

The requested URL was not found on this server. This means that you either:

A. Fell for our April Fool's joke, in which case ha ha, wasn't that amusing and harmless and mostly in good taste and not all psychologically damaging under various and sundry aspects of contemporary tort law, please don't sue us; or

B. Are genuinely enjoying, or least momentarily tolerating, our April Fool's joke and wanted to surf your way into its every last nook and cranny, in which case

1. ...ha ha, wasn't that amusing and harmless and mostly in good taste and not all psychologically damaging under various and sundry aspects of contemporary tort law, please don't sue us; and/or

2. you might want to take a trip down our April Fool's memory lane, here or here or here or here. Enjoy.