- Jan 6, 2015
- 14,040
- 26,202
I've been admin on another site and with that comes a lot of power. My jokster approach to most things, combined with the ability to tweak things under the hood, led to quite a few good times. Naturally, we typically tried to pull all those ideas to fruition for April 1, but being a truly global site we had staff enlisted for more than 24 hrs to keep all time zones entertained and then work on clean up after the fact. A few fun things we did:
1. Made a new color scheme with the worst possible mix of neons and pastels and forced everyone on the site to use that format. The telling comment was when someone said it looked like a clown threw up all over the site.
2. Word substitutions - you know that filter that when you type 5h1t it prints it on screen as **** instead? In addition to banned words getting replaced with asterisks, there is a word substitution tool. And, well, there is virtually no limit to what you can put in there. We made a few very popular user names come across less than flattering, whether it showed in their profile, next to their post, in someone quoting them, or anywhere. Similarly, we had 4 levels of staff and an additional 3 levels of users who had their usergroups listed below their avatar. Easy enough to make the Admin -> Gods and Member->Peon, or siimilar. Then, of course, we also extended substitution to some of the more common phrases. Every site has a main audience, so imagine if on this site everywhere you typed 'Gator' it cameout 'Seminole' or some such. It can flip the meaining of most of the site's posts and really confound the author's intent.
3. Forum mis-direct - we were truly global in audience, but as such it became fairly parochial in terms of where members participated. We had some global content forums, but for the most part the Americans used all those forums and the Aussie's used their own regional forum and the UK lot also stuck to their own forum. We took the most Lounge that was heavily American and anyone trying to go there got the Aussie forum and vice-versa. It was really messing with them, but it did create some cross-discussion for awhile, breaking down those invisible social walls.
4. Avatar theft - People had avatars they'd loved for years. So I stole them. I copied the images to a hidden forum temporarily, gave every one of those selected folks a generic avatar (something like "I am a retard" or somethine) and put them in a usergroup where they couldn't change away from that avatar for the duration of the joke.
5. Editing posts - as an admin, I could turn off the marker saying "post was edited by ... on ....", and I would go into someone's post and completely rewrite what they had originally said. Granted, I had to be brief in order to be quick, which is hard for me, but people would quote themselves and say "WTF?!?!?! I didn't write that!" and yet, there was no indication that it was anything other than their original post. This is what brought on the thread you are now in, as I'm editing the quotes of a troll on another site, rewriting his words to something non-trolling, in an effort to drive him nuts. He's noticed, and it is starting to bother him. I just wonder who gives up first. Likely him, as I can't play with trolls long.
There were more, and when I have a chance I'll go back and see what they were. But for now, they etertained me so I thought I'd share and see what antics you've seen done on forums before.
1. Made a new color scheme with the worst possible mix of neons and pastels and forced everyone on the site to use that format. The telling comment was when someone said it looked like a clown threw up all over the site.
2. Word substitutions - you know that filter that when you type 5h1t it prints it on screen as **** instead? In addition to banned words getting replaced with asterisks, there is a word substitution tool. And, well, there is virtually no limit to what you can put in there. We made a few very popular user names come across less than flattering, whether it showed in their profile, next to their post, in someone quoting them, or anywhere. Similarly, we had 4 levels of staff and an additional 3 levels of users who had their usergroups listed below their avatar. Easy enough to make the Admin -> Gods and Member->Peon, or siimilar. Then, of course, we also extended substitution to some of the more common phrases. Every site has a main audience, so imagine if on this site everywhere you typed 'Gator' it cameout 'Seminole' or some such. It can flip the meaining of most of the site's posts and really confound the author's intent.
3. Forum mis-direct - we were truly global in audience, but as such it became fairly parochial in terms of where members participated. We had some global content forums, but for the most part the Americans used all those forums and the Aussie's used their own regional forum and the UK lot also stuck to their own forum. We took the most Lounge that was heavily American and anyone trying to go there got the Aussie forum and vice-versa. It was really messing with them, but it did create some cross-discussion for awhile, breaking down those invisible social walls.
4. Avatar theft - People had avatars they'd loved for years. So I stole them. I copied the images to a hidden forum temporarily, gave every one of those selected folks a generic avatar (something like "I am a retard" or somethine) and put them in a usergroup where they couldn't change away from that avatar for the duration of the joke.
5. Editing posts - as an admin, I could turn off the marker saying "post was edited by ... on ....", and I would go into someone's post and completely rewrite what they had originally said. Granted, I had to be brief in order to be quick, which is hard for me, but people would quote themselves and say "WTF?!?!?! I didn't write that!" and yet, there was no indication that it was anything other than their original post. This is what brought on the thread you are now in, as I'm editing the quotes of a troll on another site, rewriting his words to something non-trolling, in an effort to drive him nuts. He's noticed, and it is starting to bother him. I just wonder who gives up first. Likely him, as I can't play with trolls long.
There were more, and when I have a chance I'll go back and see what they were. But for now, they etertained me so I thought I'd share and see what antics you've seen done on forums before.
