April Trolls Day (idea)

"It's a thin line between comedy and a hostage situation"
- Rich Hall

Now that, I've had a chance to sleep,I realise that this whole episode was rather hysterical. I admit, I was really suckered in. I even changed my password in fear (to "fuckyouhacker"). I think I only got an inkling when the troll largo said "gotta go,my parents are unplugging my 'pooter".

Let's consider what we've learned:

• People love E2.
  I stayed up until 6am watching the hilarity and chaos. Lots of other people across a whole lot of other time zones did the same. Everyone was scared that our haven, this island of rationality in a sea of AOL, was under threat. So we stayed on for hours, flaming the trolls, trying to figure out ways to piss them off (flooding their chatterbox with msgs's for example) and waiting patiently for bones or Nate to ride in with their flaming swords and smite them.

  I personally can't think of any other place on the web where I would have done anything than muttered "fucking trolls", and moved straight ahead.

• The Gods no longer have the moral high ground.
  From now on anytime the Gods tell us to grow up, we can yell, "yeah, yeah, and where were you on April fools day". Almost all of them contributed to things like "You are all cock-sucking faggots" and "I will fuck Sophanda Peters on the school bus". Just because you've earned you bullshit...

• The rest of the internet sucks ass.
  What was most scary about this prank was that it felt like the outside world breaking in. Occasionaly the odd newbie troll pops in, writes about wanking or how he has r00t in all our hedZ. It feels like a ray of light from a diseased sun. The moderation here, whatever Slashdot thinks, is great. And when it seemed to fail, it felt like all our voices were going to get swallowed up by the general noise of the internet.

  I suppose in some ways you could postulate that the real success of this prank was that it made us glad to have the editors.

• April Fools pranks are very easy to screw up.
  The reason most people were annoyed is because they couldn't post anything for hours. Now that sucked.

Now let's never speak of it again.*

*Unless of course, Bones is giving out to you for your new Vegetables that I have had in my ass node. Then fell free to say, "yeah, well where were you on April Fool's Day?!?!?"

What isn't hilarious is the way that some of the editors and Gods handled the response to this. A couple apologised and listend to people's conerns. But some decided to laregly ignore the feeling of the average Joq Q. Noder, told them to get over it and thenm unleashed the EDB when they got annoyed. I'm sure there will be millions of flames noded then quickly nuked on this topic. I just want to take this little corner of the nodgel to say:

I'm really disappointed.