Sarcastic Assassin's Journal: Slashdot and the art of an April Fool's joke

A few comments on April Fool's day on Slashdot.

It was way too over-the-top, to the point of being juvenile. It was fun seeing Slashdot done up in pink instead of the typical green, but to see an article justifying it was lame. So were all the "OMG PONIEZ" stories. Maybe it's just me, but I prefer my April Fool's humor more subtle, especially from Slashdot (on subtlety factor, I have to commend GameSpot and Ars Technica). And while I respect the fact that Slashdot decided to respect UTC instead of some provincial time zone in its observance of April Fool's, it was jarring to see Slashdot immediately revert back to the standard green color scheme at 12PM EST.

Secondly, the tagging system didn't support the joke either: almost all of the stories were tagged with "april fools", "gay", "joke", etc, which had no real effect on the "OMG PONIEZ" stories, but ruined the stories that attempted to keep a straight face.

On the plus side, the volume of April Fool's stories was respectable: just glancing at the timecodes on the first few stories, it looks like one was posted roughly every two hours, and most weren't dupes. If Slashdot could be this efficient every other day of the year...excuse me, I think my head just exploded.

Preferably, Slashdot would have suspended tagging, and had some option for the user to change the stylesheet to a "new, secret, beta, certain users only" stylesheet which, shhh don't tell anyone, is actually the blaringly pink "OMG PONIEZ" stylesheet, and which everyone has access to.