NationStates Jolt Archive


April Fools Pranks and Hoaxes - Brought to you by Loki

greed and death
01-04-2009, 18:50
Youtube is upside down!!! damn pagan holiday !!!!
Rabble rabble rabble RIOT RIOT


Put any found April fools jokes here.
Saige Dragon
01-04-2009, 18:56
I had to check. Then I laughed.
Pope Lando II
01-04-2009, 18:59
Haven't been to YouTube yet. But I liked Gmail's. Good stuff.
Technonaut
01-04-2009, 19:55
So which April fools joke of 2009 do you think was/is best* online?

I'd nominate Google's CADIE (http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/cadie/index.html) for best one so far that i've seen.
It has almost everything, possible robotic/AI uprising. A long name that means nothing and Pandas lots and lots of Pandas.
I'll add a Poll later on
Announcement
March 31st, 2009 11:59:59 pm

Introducing CADIE
Research group switches on world's first "artificial intelligence" tasked-array system.
For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.

Since then progress has been rapid, and tonight we're pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions. It's an exciting moment that we're determined to build upon by coming to understand more fully what CADIE's emergence might mean, for Google and for our users. So although CADIE technology will be rolled out with the caution befitting any advance of this magnitude, in the months to come users can expect to notice her influence on various google.com properties. Earlier today, for instance, CADIE deduced from a quick scan of the visual segment of the social web a set of online design principles from which she derived this intriguing homepage.

These are merely the first steps onto what will doubtless prove a long and difficult road. Considerable bugs remain in CADIE'S programming, and considerable development clearly is called for. But we can't imagine a more important journey for Google to have undertaken.

For more information about CADIE see this monograph, and follow CADIE's progress via her YouTube channel and blog.




*By best I mean most imaginative and funny.
Conserative Morality
01-04-2009, 20:07
Hilarious. Why aren't we doing anything?
Smunkeeville
01-04-2009, 20:12
I told the kids I was pregnant, they were pretty pissed off.
Whereyouthinkyougoing
01-04-2009, 20:43
Youtube's. Which I only checked out b/c it was mentioned in the other thread.
Smunkeeville
01-04-2009, 21:02
I really liked Gmail's.

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html
Lord Tothe
01-04-2009, 21:09
Our regional forum GMOD used the censorship features to make several names appear as a silly nickname.
Missing Dog Head
01-04-2009, 21:13
A band played on a roof in Cork pretended to be U2 and they had an audience of about a 1000 before anyone realised it was a hoax.
Whereyouthinkyougoing
01-04-2009, 21:18
A band played on a roof in Cork pretended to be U2 and they had an audience of about a 1000 before anyone realised it was a hoax.
Quality.
Conserative Morality
01-04-2009, 21:21
Quality.

Higher Quality than U2, apparently. Took 1000 people to realize they weren't.
Khadgar
01-04-2009, 21:25
Higher Quality than U2, apparently. Took 1000 people to realize they weren't.

Low hurdle to clear there.
Gravlen
01-04-2009, 21:28
Youtube's. Which I only checked out b/c it was mentioned in the other thread.

"Move to Australia" :tongue:
Copiosa Scotia
01-04-2009, 22:11
Google's had better gags in past years. Wikipedia has a list. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_hoaxes)

I've been really disappointed by the pranks this year. Most of the sites I frequent didn't even bother.
Cameroi
01-04-2009, 22:15
so it really is 1-april. thought i missed it. big deal.
some one of these years there's not going to be an april first.
that'll teach em.
Antilon
01-04-2009, 22:16
It took me until after the video and I began to look at the comments to notice that.

Anyway, my Italian teacher pulled a cruel one on us. He said tomorrow we have a test in which we have to read 5 dialogues and answer 8 questions on each of them and write 2 paragraphs with no less than 50 words each in <edit> less than 40 minutes </edit>. Then he pulled the Ol' "April Fools!!" on us. Ironically, the whole class was plotting to do something behind his back while he was writing the fake test pointers to do something to him first. The cruel part is, we still have a test tomorrow...
VirginiaCooper
01-04-2009, 22:18
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xadS1NpPsPM&flip=1
The greatest video ever with YouTube being upside down.

THIS JUST IN: David Blaine STANDS UP for a while!
Sapient Cephalopods
02-04-2009, 03:30
So, I've seen lots of pranks this year. My fave's were Urban Dead's, if anybody follows that, logged in to find my character in a "normal" city - sans the zombie apocalypse and http://nintendo.nationstates.net/.

How's about the rest of ya'll?
Efelmoren
02-04-2009, 03:46
I suffered no pranks this year :(
Sapient Cephalopods
02-04-2009, 03:49
I suffered no pranks this year :(

This was the first time in ages I didn't pull any. (Although a few friends thought I was trying to.)
SaintB
02-04-2009, 04:39
I gave my mom's fiance a cold.
Sarkhaan
02-04-2009, 05:34
I gave my mom's fiance a cold.

I wasn't aware that "herpes" qualified as a cold now...
Anti-Social Darwinism
02-04-2009, 05:36
The weather played a joke, we had an April 1 snowstorm (not quite a blizzard).

And AOL told me they were raising my fees. That was a joke, wasn't it?
Santovia
02-04-2009, 06:44
Hilarious. Why aren't we doing anything?

Did you miss "Nationstates now on Nintendo DS"? LOL
SaintB
02-04-2009, 07:24
I wasn't aware that "herpes" qualified as a cold now...

If he got herpes it was from my mom, I just gave him a cold.
Eofaerwic
02-04-2009, 09:50
Piratebay annouced they were now owned by Warner Brothers which made me chuckle. BBC iplayer now available on toasters and a new talent show Your Kitten's Got Talent were the BBCs offerings this year, not the best they've done.

Though I heard the guardians one on the radio yesterday morning and actually believed it to my shame (I hadn't woken up enough to remeber the date). Specifically the guardian annouced they were dropping their print run and entierly delivering their news via Twitter.
SkillCrossbones
04-04-2009, 16:56
Here in San Diego, a local radio show had nonchalantly mentioned throughout the broadcast that President Obama was going to be at a mall downtown, making a speech thanking eveyone for their support and all that. A few hundred people showed up, before they revealed that it was a hoax, and the President Obama was actually at the G-20 summit.

Many years ago, this same radio show had convinced more than a thousand people that the Space Shuttle Discovery had been diverted to a small airport here, despite the fact the there was no space shuttle in orbit at the time.
Fartsniffage
04-04-2009, 17:11
There was quite a good one uploaded on the work intranet.

Intranet

Centrica

Centrica hails new green EU laws

01 April 2009

New directive will affect what employees can wear to work

Two new EU draft directives, published today for consultation, have been welcomed by Centrica as a major contribution to cutting carbon emissions.



EU legislators have framed the proposals in the run-up to the major Copenhagen conference in December this year, under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.



EU Directive 19, based on research ordered by EU commissioners, is designed to curb behaviour likely to lead to excessive carbon emissions.



It suggests that workers in companies with more than 500 employees should be required to wear white clothes on alternate days. German scientists have worked out that if the working population of Europe adopted these new legislative proposals, it would be the equivalent of adding 4,000 square kilometres to the Greenland ice shelf, reflecting up to 12,000 MW of the sun’s radiation back into space.



British Gas has already had talks with clothing manufacturers to produce a range of white business suits and service engineer uniforms, ahead of the new proposal, which has won provisional backing from Member States and is expected to become law by 2011.



Directive 19 contains another proposal, which will mandate firms to maintain a minimum number of house plants within the office environment, on a ratio of one plant per computer, in order to re-absorb the carbon dioxide produced by office equipment, which is estimated to contribute a million tonnes of carbon per year within the UK alone.



Alternatively, companies will be permitted to equip their offices with roof gardens, or put turf on the roof as a similar carbon capture technology. A spokesman for Centrica Facilities said there were plans to offer staff allotments on the roof of offices, once the new rules came into force.

ยท See what YOU would look like in white - and put your name on the allotment list
South Lorenya
04-04-2009, 17:20
No AFD jokes for me -- unless you count Gamefaqs listing PS3 as a major console :p
Getbrett
04-04-2009, 19:32
I switched the ESUS forum design for a Galactic Alliance design. NSGers probably won't understand the previous sentence.
Chandelier
04-04-2009, 20:04
Hogwarts Extreme, a Harry Potter online type thing where they've banned discussion of Twilight in the past because of the chaos caused by the battles between Twilight lovers and Twilight haters and the crowding of the site with threads about Twilight, changed everything on the site, from the picture on the front to all of the location names (Diagon Alley changed to Port Angeles, etc.) to Twilight instead of Harry Potter, and changed the name of the site from HEX to TEX, even putting a word filter so that when you typed in HEX it came out TEX. Some people didn't think it was so funny and quit over it, but they did release some new items with it and everyone who participated in the fake "you must be resorted into Twilight related houses" event got some galleons and an imprint potion.
Ifreann
04-04-2009, 20:24
Low hurdle to clear there.

1000 drunk Corkonians would believe I'm U2.
Exilia and Colonies
04-04-2009, 20:34
Did you miss "Nationstates now on Nintendo DS"? LOL

I wouldn't put that past Jolt.
South Lorenya
04-04-2009, 20:54
I wouldn't put that past Jolt.

But they made the deception clear when they included the C64.