Note: Moved from
April Trolls Day, by request, to avoid the inherent problems of long
GTKY nodes
Yup, I was in on the joke. My persona was one FwuffyBunny, not so much a troll as a completely inept user who wrote very bad poetry and whined about her parents. I even made a webpage for her -- you can check it out at http://pluh.com/members/bunny/ if you want to, I was rather pleased with it. Kudos go to JyZude who spotted her as a fake right away.
I thought it was funny. Hell, I still think it was funny. Events of the previous few days that we couldn't have known about conspired to make it more effective -- and possibly scarier -- than it was meant to be. If we hadn't been slashdotted on Friday, I doubt the level of credulousness would have been so high.
Also, had DMan, Gortician et. al. not been so vociferous on /. I doubt that their names would even have been mentioned.
But every so often we do have a right to let off steam. Many of us spend day after day talking to trolls and the clueless, attempting to help them, and cleaning up after them -- and being abused and systematically downvoted for it. Our troll accounts will last no longer than most of theirs -- a bare 24 hours -- and unlike them we will clear up our own mess.
The only lasting damage will come if people don't take it as it was meant -- one day in 365 of chaos. I don't think we anticipated the panic, which I think would have been absent without the slashdot article and I personally am sorry that people were distressed. But, nonetheless, I enjoyed it, and had fun being totally irresponsible for a change.
Now, back to nuking my nodes.