I first the noticed the
pranks when
Azure Monk, on
IRC, said "Hey, why the hell is
The Gallic Wars written in l33t?" I didn't see the
l33t when I opened up the writeup, so I clicked through a few others and saw the other text filters, and then I saw the server time:
00:05 Sun Apr 1 2001
Next, the node I H4XX0RED E2!! appeared, posted by user "HA4pr1HA", so I posted a reponse explaining my obsverations to date. I updated the writeup periodically throughout the night.
Well, clearly this was some of sort of April Fools day joke, and it was more elaborate than I had thought. The trolling started with largo, Sophanda Peters, and JayStile. Now, I don't know everyone E2 so I assume that maybe they were newbieish users, which would make sense considering the Slashdot article a while ago. But that so many clueless newbies would show up all at once and spew such garbage? Hmph.
I went to #everything and found Infinite Burn concocting ways to join in the mayhem, including his own troll node idea, I didn't do it. I posted a suggestive message hinting that maybe I was involved in the chaos. At this point I was fairly sure that either someone purposely being a troll, or 3 or 4 IQ-challenged friends has stumbled upon E2. The alleged loss of editor powers seemed to be the missing link, though. I guess I should have suspected, at that point, that something was amiss. Truly, though, my first notion was that it was bunch of E2 regulars having fun at everyone's expense. I honestly never suspected to the editorship of E2 would stoop that low. I guess I know better now.
As the evening progressed, noders who were not in on the gag in #everything began to suspect a hack. People were getting frustrated and worried. Many fully believed that it was not at all a prank and that E2 had really been broken into by some semi-competent hackers.
I peronally know how such people work, and E2 is high-profile enough that someone might have deemed it worth their time. The people really DID seem to have a deeper understanding of E2 than most would, and as such I suspected that maybe they had just spent a week or two browsing and understood the concepts behind it.
I went to sleep around 1:30 AM EDT thinking that E2 had been hacked, to some extent, and that hopefully order would be restored by morning. Indeed it was, and only then did some of the editors break the news that everything, from the changing of the XP to the near-panic of some users, had been part of the prank
I would agree that it went too far, and some people got a seriously misfigured idea of E2. But things like this build character, and I think E2 will be better off having lived through this.