heliocentric's Journal: thoaxcorp.com

So, the April Fools edition on homestarrunner.com was a "site under construction" page that lead to some fighting. It is a well-done web-toon from the authors of a site full of such a level of work.

But, there was a slight Easter egg on there that I thought I would share as I found its level of work amazing.

The thoaxcorp.com site is a well-written pseudo-business page that is nearly 100% Content Free (TM). Of note, the domain is owned by one of the brothers Chapman (the people who bring you homestarrunner.com)

Obviously from the name this is The Hoax Corporation, but it is done to a level I have never seen before, and this is a topic I have personally dealt with several times. In college, a professor and I developed a system we called "Weasel Wrangling" where we would lure "weasels" (web users) to our sites that had to contain nothing of value*. We had awards for longest weasel session, most repeat weasel, etc... This of course started us on writing our own web traffic analyzers (before there was a plethora on the market).

Another instance is one that I have wanted to work on (but the web server is still DOA). I own rot26.org I would love to set this up as a fake security company (that looks legit) offering a plethora of tools based on the ultra-secure ROT-26 encryption algorithm. (One could also claim that it uses steganography since output closely resembles natural language.)

* - The thing that worked best was to hint there was some sort of illicit content on the page, but not actually say this. Say things with a sort of textual ::wink wink:: that if you found the right page you could get to a certain area that people aren't supposed to go. Give them encouragement that they are getting closer at good times helps keep interest. Also, enough pages so they haven't seen all you have, ever, kept them for a while as well. My trick? Dynamic links and prolific use of fortune output. I only had about 10 pages, each having links (like "Don't click here") or a random letter on the page, each having some degree of dynamic content, and each linking to $rand_other_page_generated_on_load. Ahh, CGI. You're just one click away, can you find it?