April Fools' Pranks

It's a bit past the month of April, but this is always a fun topic.

Do you do anything particularly sneaky or tricky on April Fools' day? I have in the past, however, before I share what I've done, I'd like to hear what some of you have pulled off.

 

Great post, for sure!

On Online Gaming Forum, I pulled a great prank. I posted the board offline message and then in it, it stated the board was closed and would no longer open. It worked. After April Fool's Day, I reopened but nobody came back. () It took me a few days to get them all back and inform them that it was a prank.

 

Oh my! It sounds like that was certainly a risky prank to pull off. :lol:

 

Certainly!

I was sort of mad that people were caught off guard that it was April Fool's Day. Why would the board abruptly close without warning? I would always send a mass PM, E-mail and also post an announcement.

 

When people see such an abrupt message, they generally tend to think negatively - hell, if I saw a "board offline" message like that, I may even freak out a bit!

 

One board I work on replaced there index page with the "FBI Site Closed due to..."

Because the board specializes in illegal items, many users were scared.

 

One thing I have learned is never pull a prank that will affect your user's ability (or desire) to read or post messages. One year I used the Encheferizer to make everyone's posts look like The Swedish Chef had written them; I'd even went so far as to replace everybody's avatars with a random Swedish Chef avatar and changed the logo so the Chef was popping out. I thought the members would find it hilarious, but absolutely no one posted that day except to complain. They're still upset about it.

 

What is wrong with Swedish? :p You can't be any better then an Swedish Man/Woman :p

 

My april fools gag went horribly wrong. It came right after a merge between my forum and another, and the forum was totally bugged. Profile information was gone, passwords needed to be reset, the whole shebang. So I went and did an april fool's joke anyways-the board became bright pink, everyone's names became Rick Astley, and every avatar became that one gif of rick dancing.

 

We always do an April Fool's joke. This year, we had just upgraded from 3.6 to 3.8 and had all the new features - visitor messages, albums, social groups, etc. The members were always joking about how we were no longer The Traders' Den, but instead we were The Traders' Space. So, I grabbed that domain name, and then modified a facebook style I grabbed from vb.org, and added that twitter a post mod and changed our site look for the day, told them to change the url in their bookmarks to thetradersspace.org, and wrote a notice telling them we had decided to move the site into a more social networking direction. They fell for it and the thread in our Site Announcements forum was full of users saying they either loved it or hated it. Of course the mods kept telling the naysayers that they needed to embrace the new social revolution and not fight it. They were all "why?? What does it have to do with out music trading site?" It was pretty funny cuz we do something *every* April Fools and they always fall for it!

 

Same here.

 

Ah, I've heard that Swedish people don't understand what the Chef is all about. You see John, on the popular TV show The Muppets, one of the characters is named the Swedish Chef. On the Swedish version of The Muppets, he is simply named The Chef, but on the American version, he speaks in an unintelligible pidgin mock Swedish accent characterized by repeated use of the phrase "bork bork bork". It is nothing like real Swedish and sounds a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger with a speech impediment. See [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_chef]Swedish Chef - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame] for more information. I hope you don't take offense on behalf of your countrymen, as the Swedish Chef is a beloved classic character and introduced many children to Swedish cuisine and culture

 

This year I changed the banner and background, similar to our biggest rival ^^

 

I agree with the comments about affecting the user's ability to read and post. I have lost count of the number of sites I've seen that have either done the "board closing down" trick, or just an announcement that it is closing. And I always cringe. Apart from it being totally unfunny, it risks killing the site.

I only ever did one joke, which *did* work. I created a "ban" button in every post, in the exact matching style, next to the "Quote" button. If you clicked this, it came up with a page saying "Thank you. The user concerned has been banned". Of course, it didn't actually ban anyone, it was just a static page in the normal vB style.

I didn't announce this at all, I just put it there and watched the various posts as people spotted it, tested it, and then waited to see if they'd actually banned someone.

Gradually people started to realise the "ban" didn't work, and then someone noticed the date and I later confessed it. It was great, but of course you can only get away with that once!

I've never had any inclination to do anything else though, it was just one of those "one time things". Much more effective is the odd posts some members make on April 1st announcing where they are going to live or work, etc.

 

That's a great prank, Mark.B, I should try that.

 

This incident was particularly infamous.

This year my own staff conspired to ban me from the forum. On Blue Moon I had a picture of the Death Star replacing the moon : )

Edit: Damn my own hotlinking protection >_>

 

Looks like both of those links are protected.

 

See my edit :-p

 

Just caught that now.

 

Sounds like an interesting social experiment in the making, Mark.B; you should have kept track of who banned who