So what did you do for April Fools day?
 

I sent the following email out to my members:

I don't think the full effect has hit yet as people havn't checked their emails and so on. I got people that never posted before posting that I got them good.

Anyone see http://slashdot.org/ ? AHAHA!

LOL! well what I did was (my sites a Toontown online fansite) and people are looking forward to the new cog Hq "Lawbot HQ" so what I did was make an announcement for the testers and it said the lawbot Hq was out I had evedryone running to test :D

Eh.. I didn't have a lot of time this year, so I just had everything translated to German. ;)

The old 'site is shutting down' one is a huuuuge risk. I have in previous years seen people lose a LOT of members over doing that because it isn't really a 'joke', it's just a straight lie. Because it sounds convincing people tend to take it at face value. Steer clear of that one.

I created a php file called ban.php that simply called a template called ban_joke. I then put a 'ban' button in all posts with an alt tage saying 'Ban <username> for one hour. When the button was clicked it simply took you to a page (created by ban.php & the ban_joke template) that appeared to confirm the user was banned for 60 mins, and asked them to make a note of the date for our records. I then announced this as 'a new feature to liven up the forum'.

Most people got it pretty quickly, but a few were left with lingering doubts as to whether it WAS a hoax or not, until I 'revealed all' at midday.

We used a little plugin that I made - which caused all the mods and admins accounts appear as though they had been deleted, and then hid a busy section of the forum from sight as well. Most people caught on pretty quick but a few were taken in, even if only for a few minutes, before they realised the date. :)

I did mine at work. I work at Treasure Island in las vegas and I work the grave shift, so right when I get on it is April fools day... so here is what I did.

Ok, so I am at work right? And I find this little strip of a torn off 20 on the ground, so I pick it up and have an idea. So I get one of our "Las Vegas Site" maps, that folds like a brouchure. So I take this little strip of the 20 and I tape it on the inside, so that when you close it it looks like a whole 20 is inside, then I taped a note saying "APRIL FOOLS!" and made a mean smilie, so I put it on the counter and the first person comes up and she is all "Hey... somone left this 20 in this map..." and I laugh and say it is a joke and for her to look inside. So the first person was a good person. But the next person...So I set it up again and put it on the counter and this older lady, like her early 40s I guess, asks where we have our 2 for 1 drink coupons. I point to them and they just so happen to be right by the "trick" she notices, and she pockets it and grabs some coupons. I see her open it on the way out and she got all mad and threw it in the trash with the note falling to the ground.

Awesomeness. :banana:

If I had a larger community and not such a close community that I knew would check the april fools thread, I would of stayed clear......


Hell I got people saying that they were gonna pay for hosting and the domain name....... Dang!

It actually made me feel really good to have such a large turnout beyond the regulars whom normally show up.

I did nothing, and that's the way I like it. :p

LOL, you got me for a second when I went to your site!!!! I even sent you a PM!!!

Good one!

I changed the style of my site to pink, daying it was a new sponsor to be announced later on... it seems that slashdot and ubuntu had the same ideas :D

Mocked up some fake "Sponsored Links" from a google search on stuff not quite appropriate for the forum and placed them on all forum pages.

I also switched on the reputation system and claimed we'd allow people to "vote" other members into a "troll booth".

Worked very well.

I had to do something big since this was my first April Fools prank on them. I will back it off a little next year. :banana:

I didn't do anything. April 1 was just another day...

I know a webmaster that announced his site was closing down, had three or four of his users immediately place orders for his domain name. When he found out they did, he was hurt, when they found out he was only fooling they were hurt... Wasn't pretty. They stopped coming to his site, and he bounced them cause he was peeved (they'd left ads on his site that they were taking the domain name and the show would go on). When others found out he bounced them (for trying to take his domain name and sending out ads on his site) they got peeved and boycotted... He was peeved at the emails they sent, bounced those people, more emails, more peeved people.. Nobody laughing, nobody visiting, nobody coming back to see that it was all a big April Fools joke.
Sometimes those April Fools jokes backfire.

the dir="rtl" is the best.

Thanks,
Mat

My Husband went into my site and put up a copyright noticed and the site had been shut down due to illegal stuff he did it to look like the mircrosoft shutdown all legal like even I was convinced I called our lawyer to ask how they could do that and was getting info and 100 phone calls from members plus msn going nuts before I looked at what day it was so needless to say he got me and my whole community!!

I was happy to see the outpour of my members who were wanting to send me donations for legal fees etc anything to get the site back open :)

I did that for only a few minutes.
Another one I did was to use for a few minutes at a time.

Under Additional CSS Definitions

*
{
unicode-bidi:bidi-override; direction: rtl;
}

What would have been cool is to have a script that would add it for 3 minutes at a time every hour or randomly during the day. Having it all day would not have been funny at all.

We couldn't pull off much sense we have a tough crowd...but we did do a little bit. One of my staff modified vB a bit to display the following message to any member who logged in after 12:00am April 1st

http://www.adminfusion.com/public/aprilfools.jpg

The image was only shown once per member and ended with a link to this thread. We also set up a redirect of 10 seconds in case somebody didn't see the link, they were sure to reach the April Fools message. After a member had already seen it once, he/she would not see it again.

Worked perfectly...we also coordinated it with our monthly newsletter so we had even more people log into the forums that day than average :)

I gave my users a new arcade game to play for a day:

http://file.sugarqube.com/Cards/jblo...wf?PL=L400x300

warning: sick

i put A E I O and U on the censor list on my forums, to be replaced with X's, all day :D

so there was posts like, whxt thx hxll xs gxxng xn?!!?

LOL

OOOooo thats good! I like that!

I run an F-Body Site (Camaro & Firebird Owners) so, I turned the site into a Mustang Forum for the day. It was worth every minute.

I would be offended if some of my top guys didn't try to buy my domain. :D

Gonna do this with my game site, by putting a banner of the biggest rival game :D

my users donated a big chunk of money on a custom style being developed now, and they know it, but have not seen a preview yet (it does look hot)

so i am using the bangladesh style tomorrow AM and telling them that is it

then once they figure it out (should only be a few minutes) i am going to switch to the vbseo style, still pretty bad compared to our style now, and see how many complaints i get....lol

--------------- Added [DATE]1238546445[/DATE] at [TIME]1238546445[/TIME] ---------------

hmmm, can't change styles, little more tweaking to do, musta missed a option...


edit, working now :D

Mhm. Am thinking to announce the promotion of some of the most prominent postwh ore newbies to moderators. Add a special user group for that and a fake staff forum.

i don't have time for April Fool... just opened a new site...

I redirected the site to an MPAA notice, it looks like this: http://psucomic.com/lol/ I did it two days ago not to raise suspicion... also had a few inside members spread lies to make matters seem worse.

I used the [you] replacement in a big announcement up top that says "Ban [you]? Vote here!" with a Rick Roll. I also switched the language setting to Right to Left and reversed the whole board.

Robot Rebellion

a small part of his huge speech

Lol, it is working very very easily :D People really think for a moment we're changing niche.

[you] replacement again but announcing a new administrator. Just did it now, forgot about april fools. Last year I got everyone good with the [you] replacement.

I v-flipped all the thumbnails of my forum http://forum.scanlover.com:D

I think this is the best one.

Since most of my users use Windows and resolutions 1024x768, i placed a splashing image of Windows Blue Screen of Death right in front of everything.

After 5 seconds users were redirected back to a special thread.

I got tons of PM's so far....

:D

I messed about with the replacement variables and changed a list of words, my list was:

and --> nd
good --> l33t
really --> rly
seriously --> srsly
the -- > teh
was --> was like
you --> U

I said the site was hacked by a guy from Hamamelidenteum Jungle, based in the Yalala Islands and hated literacy etc... you can read about it here :) http://www.friendscircle.co.uk/showthread.php?t=5660

I posted a thread here.... see if you can find it ;)

--------------- Added [DATE]1238601527[/DATE] at [TIME]1238601527[/TIME] ---------------

GENIUS LOFL!!!!! ROFL!!!!!

:rolleyes: :up: :cool:

For me, not much officially, but I did invert the colours of the style and banner on my site (which took a damn well long time to do in fact). For good or bad though, there's no annoying any of my site's members, so it working as a 'shock' is non existant.

In January, I finally upgraded my 3.6 site to 3.8. A bunch of the users freaked out over all the new social things - groups, albums, visitor messages. So, we announced today that we had a new url and a new direction towards social networking and a new layout to go with it (used the facebook one here). Then we added the vbtwitter plugin also. They freaked out even more. :cool: We knew we couldn't top last years (we used the Banning hack that ends up banning the user), so we went pretty easy on them this year. Oh, I meant to also add that as part of the notice, I listed the most popular social groups and in the list I said there was a "suprisingly popular one - Nude Pictures of Yourself (over 18 only)". It is not *the* most popular group by far! Everyone is joining to see what is going on (you can't see the discussions unless you are a member). Very funny to see that happening. :)

I did that for a couple of years. Beer went to 'milk of amnesia' and I had quite a few others. I didn't manage to remember in time this year. One of the admins rick-rolled a load of members by telling them we needed donations and that I'd been putting a brave face on it. He even managed to get me wondering what was going on until I clicked the donate.php link.

Rapscallion

What was on the the donation page?


I don't have a forum anymore so I played a prank on my mom who knows the technical side of computers.
After my mom stepped away from the computer and went to the kitchen I rushed to launch the BSOD screensaver.