My God, this was the most fun I’ve had in a long time.
Perhaps you think I need to get out more.
To all of you who objected to this, especially those who objected on behalf of other hypothetical objectors, please lighten up. It was all in good fun. Nobody got hurt, nobody died. We will clean up our mess, give our explanations and apologies, and we will get back to the serious business of wasting our leisure time in a serious manner. Please don’t worry so much, people are not as fragile as you think.
To any of you who were offended by this, I’m sorry. I’ve even heard a rumor about a threatened lawsuit. But this was
April Fools Day after all, and if you were in tears about a web site prank, you might start saving your pennies to buy a
sensory deprivation chamber for next April. Look, I love E2 as much as, probably more than, you do. I’m sorry if you feel used and/or abused by the gods and editors, but we’re entitled to a little fun once a year for all the culling and troll prevention we do. If it wasn’t for us, every day would be like April Fools Day. E2 would be
Slashdot. Or
The Stile Project.
With that said, kudos to those noders who valiantly and vainly attempted to
stem the tide of insanity in the absence of editors by trying to contact E2 gods or reasoning with trolls or whatever they tried to do. With that kind of dedication, you’ll replace me in no time.
My God, I didn’t think this was actually going to work, but it did, and brilliantly. I think the key was twofold: one, that a large group of people were in on it, and two, they all went off in their own directions, so the sheer, uncoordinated chaos prevented people from fingering the culprits and convinced them that it could not have possibly been an organized conspiracy, at least not totally.
We all knew who was who, but that was all we knew. Nobody knew exactly what anyone was going to pull, and in the confusion some of us lost track of who exactly was in on it and who wasn’t. Despite this, we all managed to pull together and play off each other’s pranks.
All (as far as I could tell) of the editors claimed they lost the power to kill, a lie that spontaneously formed with no collusion as far as I knew. Many of us appeared in the chatterbox or on
#everything wondering what was going on at the same time our trolls were
tearing the roof off.
Some individual achievements: There were
N-Wing’s tricks with the server and
dannye (acting like himself) and
jessicapierce (acting like bizarro jessicapierce) in the chatterbox. Even
Dman made a few appearances. I was especially impressed with
Sylvar and
Evil Catullus, who created consistent, realistic, believable characters during their trolling. And prize for best troll name should go to
MOM_OF_GORTICIAN
All this chaos had people speculating on just about everything.
dannye claimed that
dem bones had sold e2 for ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Some people thought we were being invaded by
Slashdot or
The Stile Project. Others combined conspiracy theories and thought that a prank by the e2 gods was compounded by an invasion of trolls, perhaps taking advantage of security vulnerabilities created by changing code. Some thought
Dman was back to exact revenge, perhaps teaming up with
JayStile.
I might as well confess, since we’ll probably release the list of who’s who anyway, I was
JayStile. As
Jet-Poop said, be afraid, be very afraid. I didn’t do anything inspired, or even interesting with the nodes I created, but the mere presence of Stile was enough to mix things up a bit and strike fear into the hearts of the newbies. When people pointed out that
Stile already had an account or that he probably wasn’t the real thing,
JayStile reminded them that last time he was here, people doubted he was real then too. When I said something in the chatterbox, people on
#everything immediately quoted me, so I cut and pasted large chunks of
irc conversation and posted them to E2 just to fuck with them.
I was warned about using the name of a real person to troll, but I decided to do it anyway. He is a public figure, and he’s an asshole, and he sent dozens of trolls over here in an attempt to screw with E2 after we downvoted a couple of his crap nodes. So fuck him. And Dman has earned every minute of abuse he’s gotten, and he’s still bitching about and slandering and lying about E2 on Slashdot this very minute, so many months after his forced departure for continually abusing noders. So fuck him too.
And for those of you who feel angry at being suckered, or who have lost respect for E2 or me personally, all I can say is I’m sorry. We are not
homophobes, sexists, or racists. Please lighten up, it was all just a joke. E2 does really love you. Well, at least the
EDB does…
Wonko, I had a troll node at -36! So there. :P
Equal time dept. Dman responds via
irc: "nice little bitch on the April Troll's node. you probably accepted bones' whine on my home node hook, line and sinker. it's great to see how you people are still ready to feed my E2 corpse to the vultures. pretty pathetic. to end this, fuck you too."
Eponymous: I don’t know what to say. Yours is the only objection I haven’t dismissed, and it’s the only one that hits home. All I can do is apologize again. Remember that authority figures are people like everyone else, just with a little more responsibility and experience, and ideally wisdom, than the people under them. We might have acted terribly irresponsible last night, but we can be stupid and juvenile and fun-loving and irresponsible just like anyone else. I had the time of my life, and I won’t apologize for that, but if your respect for me and the other editors and gods has dimmed, I’m not sure what we can do to change that. If we fucked up today, please try to judge us by what we manage to accomplish on the other 364 days of the year. And to you and everyone who objected, we might not agree with your gripes, but we do notice that you care enough about
E2 to complain about it so strongly. Thanks for sticking around.