Happy (?) April Fools

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Like the thing I don't get with these pranks: who is having fun?

Like a good prank should be like, it makes me angry in the moment but then I can laugh along once the curtain rises. This just leaves me tired, confused.

Building something on fake animosity is just eurgh

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Like I knew the site thing was a joke but reading the Reckoner thread post-that made me feel rather uneasy even though I knew it was a joke

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It's just like, you have to find the balance when it comes to a prank like this.

Let me summarize what I think happened: the GD mods put into effect a new policy that included one's self in the insulting clause, and then banned a whole bunch of people based on that. A pretty random group if you ask me --Vijarada, Bellaphant, Xalxe, McMenno, Reck, and more--so at this point yeah it's pretty much certain it is a joke, but in honesty it feels really poorly executed. It didn't hold up to the mystique, nor was it really humorous (to me--I guess this is a point of subjectivity worth clarifying).

And then Reck opens a thread in Site Ideas which, in actuality, isn't that different from previous posts he's made or anything. I guess kudos to him for acting really well I guess, but it was so well done that it was uncomfortable, especially because the rest was obviously a joke. And then the skype conversation and the screenshots kept adding realism to it. It sort of became an uncanny valley of an April Fool's prank.

And then like...the whole modding system sort of fell apart, and groups were against each other and stuff? But like, there wasn't humor per se, it was simply animosity towards one another. It was also hard to follow; stuff was happening in sitechat, in Site Ideas, GD, Announcements. On top of all of this, Psyche was doing his own thing in the Title Fairy forum.

I guess in the end it just feels overcomplicated and muddy. Like I said, I can't really go back and be like "wow what a great bamboozle". I think April Fool's pranks work best when they're simple, like some of the stuff Nahdia suggested in Reck's Site Ideas thread.

I guess what I'm trying to say in too many words is that it just wasn't a good April Fool's prank. Sorry guys, try again next year I suppose?

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I guess we just have differing philosophies about April Fool's. Pretty much anyone and everyone knows what April 1st means, so it's nigh-impossible to fool anyone, especially the clever sort this site attracts.

You're trying to argue both "April Fool's is meant to fool you!" and "This April Fool's joke was

so

obvious!" and that's EXACTLY why this joke is getting mixed reviews.

I think the way to do anything on a medium as impersonal as an Internet forum is to make it dopey and low-impact. Like, changing everyone's avatars to kittens would be an obvious joke but it's also aggressively harmless. Compare "wow, you got a Scottish Fold? TEAM ANGORAS 4 LYFE" vs. "Wow Reck sure doesn't seem to like MattP anymore. The mods at are odds with one another. Hm"

Like one more thing is that this joke would be incredibly complex to understand if you just started visiting this site. I get that we are a deep community but it required an understanding of Reck's past behavior, moderator distinctions, recent rule discussions, etc.

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Yeah. The thing to promote is that this was all really low-stakes, like I'm not really angry at anyone or anything, I just wanted to point out how it made me feel, especially since it seemed to be somewhat of a common sentiment.

But yeah, there's always next year!