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Wikipedia Covers April Fool's Hoaxes 129

Posted by Zonk from the check-out-what-you-missed dept.
vladd_rom writes "Wikipedia maintains an up to date list with April Fools hoaxes from this year. The list already includes hundreds of entries. Among the most popular, one could find Google Romance, a new Google.com project, Google Browser, as well as Yahoo!'s desire to buy all Web 2.0 companies on the web. However, it seems that this year hoaxes will be more interconnected: the wiki page already includes some websites that announced that they have been bought by Yahoo!, and linked to Yahoo!'s blog post from their pages."
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Wikipedia Covers April Fool's Hoaxes More

Wikipedia Covers April Fool's Hoaxes

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  • Finally, back to the old green color... more comfortable.

    • interconnected hoaxes (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      aka hoax 2.0
    • Finally, back to the old green color... more comfortable.

      Yeah - but it will take a while for the retina burn to recover...

    • Re:Back to Green (Score:5, Funny)

      by Kethinov ( 636034 ) on Saturday April 01, 2006 @09:08PM (#15043790) Homepage Journal
      Alas ye olde pinkdot, we barely knew ye. Return unto us hither in a better life, anew.

      • At least someone has a sense of humor (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Infonaut ( 96956 ) <infonaut@gmail.com> on Saturday April 01, 2006 @09:19PM (#15043807) Homepage Journal

        Alas ye olde pinkdot, we barely knew ye. Return unto us hither in a better life, anew.

        I laughed out loud when I read that one.

        After reading the vitriolic posts on Slashdot today, you'd think someone had pissed in everyone's Wheaties. It's just April Fool's Day. The editors of Slashdot wanted to have some fun. They do a great job of providing geek fodder 365 days a year, and this is the one day of the year they get to goof off. Maybe it could have been done better. Maybe it could have been done worse. Still, I don't really understand why everyone has become so unhinged.

        The site is FREE, and unless you're in a really bad domestic situation, nobody is pointing a gun at your head, forcing you to read Slashdot. If the site makes you go into a homicidal rage every April Fool's Day, get stoned, sit in a corner, and don't point your browser at Slashdot for 24 hours. Better yet, come up with some witty responses like Kethinov's, rather than all of this foaming at the mouth, all caps nonsense. Nothing is more ludicrous than reading some mouth-breather's spelling-deprived, syntax-challenged account of how fucked up Slashdot gets on April Fool's Day.

    • MY EYES!!!

      They can see again! Slashdot made this miracle!
      (But as this was the same Slashdot that blinded me, there is no credit at all...)
    • What, you're still relying on webmasters to provide a comfortable set of colors for you? Wow, how... sad. I haven't surfed the web with page-specified colors enabled since 1998. If webmasters' tastes in colors are anything like as bad now as they were then, I don't want any part of it. All pages have #FFE6BC text on a #294D4A background as far as I'm concerned.
    • Shame however that the "old green" theme is still mightily ugly.

      But that just shows that techies mostly do not care about user interface design, or indeed estethics.
    • Yeah! I prefer old green color as well.

  • It's obvious (Score:5, Funny)

    by eclectro ( 227083 ) on Saturday April 01, 2006 @08:27PM (#15043704)

    Chuck Norris rides horses, not ponies. He kicked slashdot so hard that it turned green.
  • You mean Yahoo didn't take over the world? I feel somewhat cheated.
    • 3. What is Soulmate Search?
      Here on the Google Romance team, we follow the philosophy "Don't be medieval," so we brought only the latest psychographic and search algorithms to bear on the problem of hooking up our users. First you fill out an extensive personal profile carefully designed by a team of both married and single Google engineers for the express purpose of gathering and analyzing romantic information. Then you fill out an equally obscure and elaborate profile describing various attributes of the p

      • Re:Google Romance (Score:2, Informative)

        by BkBen7 ( 926853 )
        /me remembers that gmail was an april fools joke too......


        Ya never know...

        • Re:Google Romance (Score:2, Informative)

          by Zarel ( 900479 )
          Well, GMail didn't say this [google.com]:

          The requested URL was not found on this server. This means that you either:

          A. Fell for our April Fool's joke, in which case ha ha, wasn't that amusing and harmless and mostly in good taste and not all psychologically damaging under various and sundry aspects of contemporary tort law, please don't sue us; or

          B. Are genuinely enjoying, or least momentarily tolerating, our April Fool's joke and wanted to surf your way into its every last nook and cranny, in which case

      • 4. Really? It's that simple?
        Well, you know how when you do a regular Google web search, you get back uncannily accurate search results?

        5. Usually. But sometimes they're a little off.
        Yeah, that's why our early testers thought that Soulmate Search's "Did you really mean...?" feature came in very handy.

        6. What is Contextual Dating?
        It's a free date plus the added accrued value of the past decade's worth of post-Industrial Age online marketing genius, all tied into a real-time, video-based, GPS-tracked, psychogr

  • Noooo! (Score:4, Funny)

    by tgtanman ( 728257 ) on Saturday April 01, 2006 @08:28PM (#15043708)
    Where'd my pink ponies go ?!?

  • All is well again.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 1053r ( 903458 ) on Saturday April 01, 2006 @08:32PM (#15043712)
    I think that "pink ponies" is perhaps the most annoying april fool's joke I have seen on the net so far...

    And by the way, I posted this already [slashdot.org]
    • (grabs Spirit of Adventure rulebook...)


      "From the Citadel of Ultimate Darkness, oh Silver Dragin, bring forth to this plane PomyPuff, demonic spawn of cuteness, to do thy will!"

  • Do not follow the links! It's a Hoax and my anti-virus went crazy when I clicked the links!

  • /. April Fools Jokes (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HillBilly ( 120575 ) on Saturday April 01, 2006 @08:33PM (#15043716)
    Get worse every year and get taken to far to the point where the site is unuable for a day. Have one good joke and thats it, don't screw up the user experience.

  • Still pink? (Score:5, Funny)

    by brian0918 ( 638904 ) <brian0918@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Saturday April 01, 2006 @08:34PM (#15043718)
    Is the color scheme still pink, or did we switch back to the green? I shouldn't have clawed my eyes out...

    At least my typing skills are still omysvl//////

  • Get Your Pink Ponies Here (Score:4, Informative)

    by dduardo ( 592868 ) on Saturday April 01, 2006 @08:35PM (#15043721)
    Pink Pony CSS [slashdot.org]

    • Re:Get Your Pink Ponies Here (Score:5, Informative)

      by sahrss ( 565657 ) on Saturday April 01, 2006 @10:19PM (#15043922)
      .jar file [sahrs.net]

      For FF 1.5 with Slashdotter 1.2.2 extension. Adds functionality for:
      <3 OMG!!! PONIES!!! <3
      Copy it to replace the one used by the Slashdotter extension in your FF profile files (for Windows users, that's in your Documents and Settings folder.)
      • (replying to my own post with an update)

        Looks like the Slashdotter extension will have ponies by default in a future version.

        From here [mozilla.org]:

        Re: OMG PONIES

        by Christopher Finke, April 01, 2006 10:05pm

        For those who don't know, Slashdot is using a pink girly theme for April Fools day. It has nothing to do with this extension, although version 1.4 lets you choose to use the PONIES theme if you still want pink Slashdot goodness once the theme is removed as the default.

        Thanks man! I love the ponies ;)

    • That's at least giving me some pink top bars, but the logo in the top left is back to "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Any hope for improvement?
  • They used their normal Google logo, instead of one that highlighted the season or some current event (like basketballs, snowflakes, 4 leaf clovers on St. Patty's day, olympic rings).
  • The best April foold's DAy joke that Slashdot ever covered was the . [slashdot.org]
    Wikipedia even talks about the evil bit [wikipedia.org]. I hope Slashdot remembered to set the evil bit to on before posting their Pink style sheets. CSS now means Crippling Stye Sheets.

  • Thanks God it's over... (Score:5, Funny)

    by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Saturday April 01, 2006 @08:40PM (#15043736) Homepage Journal
    ... that pink was hurting my eyes. Then again, it was a convenient reminder that there was nothing worth bothering with on Slashdot for the last 24 hours.

    I used to love April Fools hoaxes, but it's become lame. Attention! A HOAX IS NOT FUNNY WHEN EVERYBODY KNOWS IN ADVANCE IT'S A HOAX!!!! If you want to do an April Fool hoax, make at least a token effort to suprise your audience. Like this email, which got delivered to every employee of a certain large hitech company this morning:

    TO: U.S. Employees
    FROM: Global Employee Name Management
    DATE: April 1, 2006
    CONTACT: Name Management x94678 (WHO-R-U)
    ACTION: Please read.

    This bulletin contains important information about your name.

    Overview

    XXXX has long had a requirement that every UNIX username inside XXXX be
    unique. The transition to these globally unique usernames was at times
    painful, but the result has been that XXXX has been able to support a
    level of global operation that is unprecedented.

    It is now time to take that process to its next logical step: Ensuring
    that employees' names are unique.

    Employees with duplicated names represent immeasurable opportunities
    for confusion, wasted time, and security breaches. In the interests of
    improving the efficiency of the company, we are embarking on an
    ambitious effort to improve this situation by making employees' names
    globally unique.

    Implementation

    In the first phase, to be implemented between today and April 1, 2007,
    approximately 800 employees with duplicated first and last names will
    be renamed to eliminate the duplication. At the completion of this
    phase, it will be possible to uniquely refer to any XXXX employee using
    the employee's first and last name.

    In the second phase, to be implemented between April 1, 2007 and April
    1, 2008, approximately 20,000 employees with duplicated first names and
    last initials will be renamed to eliminate the duplication. At the
    completion of this phase, it will be possible to uniquely refer to any
    XXXX employee using the employee's first name and last initial. In
    addition to the obvious convenience improvement involved, substantial
    savings are expected through eliminating printing the full last name on
    various internal documents. The ink required to print a typical name
    will be cut in half!

    In the third phase, to be implemented between April 1, 2008 and April
    1, 2009, all employees at the Vice President level and above will be
    renamed so that their first and last initials are unique. Employees at
    the E/Z-10 level will be renamed so that their first, middle, and last
    initials are unique. In addition, in each Director-level group and
    each building, all employees will be renamed so that their first,
    middle, and last initials are unique. At the conclusion of this phase,
    it will be possible to refer to any highly visible employee using only
    two or three letters, and to any employee in a particular organization
    or physical location using only three letters. In the vast majority of
    cases, use of initials should be sufficient to identify an employee.

    New Employees

    New employees will be required to conform to the naming requirements in
    effect on their start date. If required to pick a new name, they will
    be encouraged to take the future naming requirements into account in
    their choice.

    Conflict Resolution

    In general, the employee with the lower badge number will retain the
    original name, and those employees with higher badge numbers will be
    renamed. The employee will be allowed to choose a new name, but if the
    employee is not able to decide on a suitable name before the deadline,
    a new name will be assigned in consultation with the employee's
    manager.
    I immediately fired back a letter pointing out that it would be more efficient to simply fire employees with non-unique names. Of course, I didn't remind them that I have a long, unusual name...

  • Worst - April - Fools - ever.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Andy Gardner ( 850877 ) on Saturday April 01, 2006 @08:44PM (#15043747)
    Seriously what the hell just happened. Since when has april fools day been about making a fool of yourself?

    Where was that single hoax among the serious articles that sucked you in, until you did the double-take and realise you'd been 'had'? I expected something intelligent from /., something subtle. Instead we got 3000 comments about PONIES.

    For shame /.

  • Next april fools (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BkBen7 ( 926853 ) <bkben3@gmail.com> on Saturday April 01, 2006 @08:46PM (#15043751) Homepage
    we should give everyone mod points for the whole day.

    • Re:Next april fools (Score:5, Insightful)

      by techno-vampire ( 666512 ) on Saturday April 01, 2006 @08:52PM (#15043763) Homepage
      No. We should tell everybody they have mod points, but if they don't really have them, they get an April Fools page when they try to use them.
      • A few ideas I had while folding laundry:

        * Replace the Slashdot front page with some sort of error message typical of Windows error messages. Let the real front page get through every 1,000 visits or something.

        * Reverse the moderation system. I.E. all "good" moderations actually count negative.

        * AJAX-ify the living shit out of the front page.

        * Trade domains with Digg for a day.

        Etc.

        April fools day is supposed to be a day where you see if you can fool people. Not a day where you make jokes. I'll admit, the Pon
      • ..shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again. (old Tennessee saying -scnr)

        If people weren't notified right away that their moderation wouldn't count, but, say, a day later this could really work on some people; they'd be moderating all say. ;)

        A more elaborate verion of this idea would be to seemingly allow *every* slashdotter to post news which would even show up on the(ir modified local) main page.

    • I am looking forward to what they cook up next year. Since they hit us over the head this year with pink ponies, I wonder what they could possibly come up next year. Usually you would expect next years joke to top this years. To the whiners: I bet you are going to be right here with the rest of us hitting the reload button on slashdot to see what is going to pop up.
    • I was thinking the same thing. That would probably overload the servers though, with so many people submitting forms.

  • Worst ever April disaster (Score:3, Interesting)

    by daniel23 ( 605413 ) on Saturday April 01, 2006 @08:53PM (#15043766)

    with that evil color scheme and having to disable the foolish css after every reload or link I quit my fav pretense of being busy entirely.
    Which in fact raised my productivity but looking at the number of comments I feel I wasnt the only one to do so.
    What about taking /. offline next year? April fooling the DNS or something?
  • It's still April 1st.. Slashdot isn't pink anymore, now a genuine post?! What is happening to slashdot? Noooooooo...

  • A Hoax!?! (Score:5, Funny)

    by ArikTheRed ( 865776 ) on Saturday April 01, 2006 @09:06PM (#15043789) Homepage
    Wait... so I shouldn't have registered boycottyahoofortakingovertheweb.org? Damnit!

  • Regarding tagging... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 01, 2006 @09:17PM (#15043806)
    Just noticed this as it occured for this story. When the tags are clearly wrong, it should be possible to vote them negatively. For example, -gay would score down the tag and, hopefully would eventually disappear.

    • Re:Regarding tagging... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sigma 7 ( 266129 ) on Saturday April 01, 2006 @10:24PM (#15043932)
      Prepend a '!' - this is the equivalent of negating a tag.
      • For a while, all the front page stories are now tagged as "!gay", perhaps because the number of well-meaning Slashdotters outnumbered the trolls, but having "!gay" is just as effective as "gay" from the trolls' perspective. Slashcode tags need to be updated so that an exclamation point at the beginning of the tag makes it not visible while also performing the expected negation of the incorrect/offensive tag.
  • was getting a little tired of all the pink crap on /. I mean, next time cant ya'll pick a color thats slightly more condusive.

    I liked 2 or 3 years ago on slashdot, when they still made slashdot look... normal, and act normal. Ya know, like posting news, to obvious fakes, but still posting news. Last year's dupe on dupe sucked, and the pink ponies was stupid. April Fools should be about hoaxes and practicle jokes, and turning the SITE PINK DOESNT COUNT!@!!!@!23113 OMG PONIE RUSH!
  • Google has registered the domain gbrowser.com [betterwhois.com].
  • I continually reloaded /. hoping to see the latest April 1st RFC. I'm somewhat disappointed. ):

  • What's up with the tagging? Why the need for people to tag all the April 1 stories as "gay".
    I appreciate the people who rebutted with "straight" tags, but honestly, how juevenille.
  • Since when was wikipedia "gay, ponies" (tags) ?
  • More than any other site, Slashdot completely ruins itself on April Fools. They post so many garbage stories I usually avoid the site completely April 1st & 2nd. Not so this year, though I wish I would've and might stop slashdotting for few days in protest. While the pink might have been "funny", all the stores that look like they written by a 14 year old girl on MSN really are awful. Not funny, not -gotcha, April Fools!-, just awful.
  • Not too long ago, April 1, 2002 [wikipedia.org] Slashdot pulled the following prank:

    Slashdot announced that it would start posting advertiser-sponsored news stories, and disable anonymous posting.

    Guess only half of that was true.
  • When I first visited the Wikipedia page yesterday, it contained [wikipedia.org] the following:

    Slashdot incorporated a pink "OMG!!! Ponies!!!" theme at 00:00 UTC. This girlish theme is in stark contrast for a techie website believed to be mostly frequented by male nerds. A "Special Birthday Report" [4] about Jeff "Hemos" Bates emerged in the first minutes of the day. A link to Thinkgeek's wireless extension cords has also been posted. The presence of humor on Slashdot has yet to been confirmed.

    That sentence probably disapp

  • I wish one of these years people would actually take timezones into account. I live in New Zealand, so it's well into the 2nd of April before I start seeing April Fools jokes appearing on slashdot, and because slashcode takes my timezone into account, the stories appear with April 2nd dates on them, making it even harder (okay, not this year cause they were all in pink) to work out which is which.
  • Is there an url that will let me see the original april 1 /. article in its original pink?

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