April Fools Day

[steven s]

I know many people object to April Fools Day pranks on forums.
But. . .
I do like doing something one day a year, even if it's for a few hours or minutes at a time.

A bad one I did that I will not do again is to tell our members that I was fed up and closing the site.

I have changed the forum to RTL on occasion. Changed the styles to specific usergroups.

I'd like to do something this year, hopefully as an addon so it could be controlled by time and usergroup.

Any suggestions?

 

[CTXMedia]

Last year I set all my members' user titles to "Moderator" for half the day (although I didn't go so far as to actually make them moderators!!!).

Got a few laughs out of a lot of people and confused the hell out of some of the others who'd forgotten what day it was ...

You could also use filtering to change popular words into something different - just for a few hours; nothing horrible, just a bit of fun.

Cheers,
Shaun

 

[dieketzer]

why wait til april 1? one of the best is to set the forum closed message to 'you have been banned for: harassment', then doing a bit of maintenance

 

[Fred Sherman]

1. Turn avatar upside down.
2. Export your current styles. Create some hideous ones and import them as the same name. You can later import your exported saves to restore.
3. User Discouragement (dialed down to a really mild setting) for everyone

 

[Trombones13]

Obviously, I haven't done anything on my current forum before, lol, but on the other forum I'm an administrator of, the root admin altered a bunch of custom user titles to plays on the original. Several of the custom titles had to do with a Gym Leader position (it's a Pokemon forum ), i.e. Beacon Gym Leader -> Bacon Gym Leader, Beacon Gym Assistant -> Bacon Gym's Attack Dog (or something like that, haha), etc. It was fairly amusing. We'd talked about silly stylistic changes i.e. PokeFarm -> PolkFarm, PokerFarm, etc. where we'd change the logo and theme to reflect the name change, but we haven't gone through with it yet because we're lazy (and vB's style editor isn't as quick/easy to use ).

 

[bambua]

I run a World of Warcraft guild that's been together almost 10 years now through Everquest and to the present. Last year on April Fools day I rebranded our site and said that I was changing our name to Clan Elmo...was a lot of fun and harmless.

 

[Floris]

I will consider adding <xen:include template="april.css" /> to page_container
which just adds additional css3 which swirls the links around as you hover over them.
Which should cover 50% firefox, 99% webkit and 0% internet explorer.

 

[Fred Sherman]

Is April Fool's Day internationally known? I've never done anything before. All of my users are IBM engineers from all over the world. Would users in India, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and South Africa get it? You wouldn't think so, but engineers are some of the best practical jokers, coming up with some pretty complex jokes.

 

[Decent60]

Is April Fool's Day internationally known? I've never done anything before. All of my users are IBM engineers from all over the world. Would users in India, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and South Africa get it? You wouldn't think so, but engineers are some of the best practical jokers, coming up with some pretty complex jokes.

Only bad part of complex jokes, sometimes they make them too complex and hardly anyone understands them, but I agree that many engineers are great with jokes haha.

 

[Ati]

Is April Fool's Day internationally known?

I think it's pretty much International.

 

[iTuN3r]

Is April Fool's Day internationally known? I've never done anything before. All of my users are IBM engineers from all over the world. Would users in India, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and South Africa get it? You wouldn't think so, but engineers are some of the best practical jokers, coming up with some pretty complex jokes.

Yes it's more common in Countries like india & china they do nasty pranks

 

[Fred Sherman]

Awesome. I'll convert my site over to a Sun Microsystems Support Forum for a day.

 

[Mark.B]

I absolutely *deplore* stupid April Fools jokes on forums. Especially those people who announce their forum is closing down. I've seen entire sites killed with that little "joke". And if as an administrator you tell what amounts to a deliberate lie to your members, you are in trouble.

The one time I did try something, and it worked quite well, was introducing a "ban" button in post. I announced that if you really disliked someone's post you could hit this button and it would ban the user for 30 minutes.
I even wrote a simple redirecting php page that pulled the username from the post concerned and put a normal-looking standard vBulletin message up saying "Thank you. User: xxxx has been banned for 30 mins" before redirecting back to the thread. But of course it didn't actually ban the user!

It was quite phun watching people try it and then seeing them gradually realise it hadn't worked as the user continued to post. Then the date eventually dawned on people.

That was back in 2004, I doubt I'd do it again. But if I did, I'd make it more sophisticated so it created a log of who tried to "ban" who. Then afterwards I could publish it for a giggle so everyone could see who tried to ban who.
That'd be evil. But, I won't ever do it, because I do not believe playing jokes on your members and humiliating them is a good way to run a site.

 

[Trombones13]

I absolutely *deplore* stupid April Fools jokes on forums. Especially those people who announce their forum is closing down. I've seen entire sites killed with that little "joke". And if as an administrator you tell what amounts to a deliberate lie to your members, you are in trouble.

The one time I did try something, and it worked quite well, was introducing a "ban" button in post. I announced that if you really disliked someone's post you could hit this button and it would ban the user for 30 minutes.
I even wrote a simple redirecting php page that pulled the username from the post concerned and put a normal-looking standard vBulletin message up saying "Thank you. User: xxxx has been banned for 30 mins" before redirecting back to the thread. But of course it didn't actually ban the user!

It was quite phun watching people try it and then seeing them gradually realise it hadn't worked as the user continued to post. Then the date eventually dawned on people.

That was back in 2004, I doubt I'd do it again. But if I did, I'd make it more sophisticated so it created a log of who tried to "ban" who. Then afterwards I could publish it for a giggle so everyone could see who tried to ban who.
That'd be evil. But, I won't ever do it, because I do not believe playing jokes on your members and humiliating them is a good way to run a site.

There was a mod that I saw on vB that did just that, but trying to ban someone actually ended up banning you, even if you were a staff member. hehe

 

[Rigel Kentaurus]

Is April Fool's Day internationally known? I've never done anything before. All of my users are IBM engineers from all over the world. Would users in India, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and South Africa get it? You wouldn't think so, but engineers are some of the best practical jokers, coming up with some pretty complex jokes.

Not really, here in Mexico we don't do anything (I don't even know what April Fool's stand for), I think it is mostly the same for the other Latin American countries, it is not observed. My members would be really really confused as they would not be expecting anything special that day. With all this "globalization" some people come to know it, but it is still an exception.

We do have the Holy Innocents day on December 28 that works pretty much like an April's Fools, though, and I have done really creative stuff that day.

Last year I announced I was doing a reorg of all the forums. Then, I "deleted" all our current forums (I just renamed the forum table) and then I created 300 new forums or so of different topics). After the joke was over I only renamed the forum table back, got rid of the temporary one, and moved all the new threads to an archive forum

 

[Slavik]

the [you] tags work great,

Last year I made a thread

"Welcome to our new moderator! [you]"

got a lot of confusion.

 

[Fred Sherman]

Okay, how about this...

You're Joe User. The admin just announced a forum upgrade.

You start reading and notice you now have a "ban as spam" button on each post. Tempted, you click on the button.

The pop-up comes up...

Are you sure you want to ban user? Except the user name isn't the person who posted, its your name.

You click cancel.

Pop-up...

{your username} has been permanently banned.
You will be returned to the forum or click here if not redirected in 10 seconds

10 seconds pass....

Pop-up

APRIL FOOLS!
You just couldn't resist yourself, could you!

I like it. Harmless, yet full of momentary drama as everything appears to go dreadfully wrong.

 

[steven s]

^^^^
Sort of like a wet paint sign. People will touch wet paint to see if it's dry.

 

[iTuN3r]

Okay, how about this...

You're Joe User. The admin just announced a forum upgrade.

You start reading and notice you now have a "ban as spam" button on each post. Tempted, you click on the button.

The pop-up comes up...

Are you sure you want to ban user? Except the user name isn't the person who posted, its your name.

You click cancel.

Pop-up...

{your username} has been permanently banned.
You will be returned to the forum or click here if not redirected in 10 seconds

10 seconds pass....

Pop-up

APRIL FOOLS!
You just couldn't resist yourself, could you!

I like it. Harmless, yet full of momentary drama as everything appears to go dreadfully wrong.

We did it few times lol there was tons support emails that day.

 

[Edrondol]

One year we had an "alt day". Everyone created an alt that had the word "Grue" in it somewhere. It was MADNESS!