Or, another reason why I hate my message board
A photo of a prank I found on Flickr, Photo Credit Goldberg
Note: The forum in question doesn’t exist any more.
Last year when my forums were shiny and new, I anticipated with great glee my first April Fool’s Day as a site owner/administrator. Oh! How many days did I spend merrily thinking of all the mischief I could cause? How sweet was the anticipation? The possibilities! Oh, the possibilities!
Now, here’s the thing with me, I’m not sure if it’s a plus or a minus; that is something for each person to decide for themselves. I have this ability to think of things that would be funny to do, but then instead of doing them, I keep thinking and find reasons why I probably shouldn’t do them. So, most of my ideas were discarded just as quickly as I came up with them.
Give everyone some strange default av? Somebody would get upset that I’d stolen their individuality.
Pretend I shut the board down or accidentally deleted all the threads? A lot of people would be angry at me toying with them and potentially very upset if they had a particularly important thread going.
Redirect url to porn site? Somebody could get fired.
As you can see coming up with a suitably mild prank was more difficult than you’d think. Finally, the moderation team and I settled on using the bad word filter to change a few common words. Specifically, I changed lol to “I am amused, mildly” and all the other lol-nyms to similar phrases I can’t remember and swapped vegemite for peanut butter and vice versa (this last was never discovered, which was a shame because it would have been funny given a discussion that was going on at the time).
How could this go wrong you might ask? Well…it turns out that a poster on our board had a terrible experience that left her quite shaken. Another poster replied to her and said something comforting then something self-deprecating followed by a lol. Sort of a nervous giggle kind of lol, which was turned into “I am amused, mildly”.
Another poster was upset at what she thought was this poster being amused, mildly by the horrific experience of the original poster and there was much confusion. All of this happened while I was asleep, so it took a while before we could straighten everything out. You can imagine the arguing over whether or not this was funny or not and in the end one poster left and I wound up looking like a jerk.
Needless to say, I won’t be doing that again!
If you’re in IHMMB poster and would still like to be pranked, here’s what you should do. Go to the bottom of the forum page. Where it says “Order: Last Post” pick an order at random. Similarly, you can change Z-A to A-Z. The thread titles will now be arranged by poster name or number of posts or the oldest posts will be first. Go away for a few minutes and forget you did it.
When you come back, choose randomly from one of these options:
- Read a few posts, say “Hey, didn’t we talk about this in June?” think for a second, say AHA! Change the order of the threads back to most recent first and have a mild chuckle imaging everyone else’s confusion.
- Read a few posts, say “Hey, didn’t we talk about this in June?” start a thread to ask “WTF?” (use that as your title) and when you don’t see it on the list of first page threads, either search for it and keep bumping it up or start a new thread. Repeat.
- Read a few posts, say “Hey, didn’t we talk about this in June?”, think for a second, get angry at this waste of your time, put threads back in proper order and start a thread titled “WTF, this crap isn’t funny!!!!!!!!”
- Read a few posts, say “Hey, didn’t we talk about this in June?” and go and post something on my Facebook wall asking WTF? Make sure to mention something about not desiring to do housework.
- Read a few posts, say “Hey, didn’t we talk about this in June?” and start a thread on one or more other forums people from IHMMB post on titled “Hey, is anyone having trouble with IHMMB?”
And there you have it, your virtual April Fool’s from your buddies at IHMMB. Thank you, you’ve been great! Make sure to tip your servers on the way out!
