April Fools Results

[April Fools Proof Shield] Remember how I said that with my luck, the university I want to go to will tell me on the last hour of the last day whether I was accepted or not? It has been almost an entire day since they were supposed to tell me at the latest. I hope they are not playing an April Fools joke on me like I did to all of you! [/shield]

Two April Fools Jokes Revealed – If you read the news story below, you would have seen the secret message I encoded into the second paragraph from the Thursday, March 29th news story – “WPM WILL FOOL U.” No one figured out that I slipped a secret message into that paragraph because (a) no one was looking for it, and (b) the paragraph was contradicting the secret message. I am surprised that no one even thought to look for a secret message, considering how choppy the structure of the paragraph was and our past history with April Fools jokes. Anyway, here are the pranks that were pulled:

Forums – Towards the end of last summer, our forums were compromised by Turkish hackers. As I stated in several of my news stories this past week, school was extremely busy for me, with major assignments due all week. When I was working on my Armenian Genocide internal assessment for IB, I came across an Armenian website hacked by Turkish people, which reminded me of our own hacking, and thus, the idea for creating a fake hacking for our own forums. So, I made it appear that all of the mods were banned, placed a “hacked” message on the top of the forums (you had to scroll down to see the real forums, which some people did not even realize), and I told all of the moderators not to respond to any threads. The results? People were freaking out. Some even went to other forums in the Pokemon community and voiced their concerns. It was quite hilarious to see how some people reacted – I received 19 e-mails and several PMs.

Press Release about Worlds – This one was not as obvious of an April Fools prank because (a) it was believable, and (b) it was written to sound like a press release. PokePop contacted me on Saturday with the idea of both of us posting a fake press release to get everyone in the TCG community to believe that it was real, and I was excited with the idea and went along with it. He wrote the original press release and created the idea behind it, and then I heavily edited it to sound more realistic. I received so many instant messages about this press release that I had to block the entire TCG group on my buddy list at certain times in the day due to the massive amounts of messages bombarding me. Even the most experienced players were contacting me, astonished with the idea of Worlds ending in a type of “pre-release draft.” I bet no one expected two websites posting the same fake press release, and that is why there was merit behind it and not as many people doubting its origins. :D

Until next year!