Last year I played it very serious. I decided to do the opposite this year and play it quite silly, with Visual Novels on disabled girls and ponies being scattered all over. Friendship is Magic! Even then, I tried to keep a semblance of veracity to plant a seed of doubt in your mind. "What if he's serious?" The mix of pranks & real new elements didn't help!

The board skin used to display these pages is now back to your previous selection. The Ponies theme is still available if anyone wants to switch to it. To do so, go to edit your profile and select the Ponies option. If I see that no one has any interest in it, I'll remove it in a month or so. That'll save me the trouble of having to keep it up-to-date!

I've made some switches all around, and you might have missed some of these:
- The board's theme was obviously all about Ponies and pastel colors.
- Items were scattered all over, triggering a treasure hunt!
- New (temporary) forums were added for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Bad Box Art Mega Man, and Katawa Shoujo.
- Everyone wore the title of "Admin (not really)"
- On the Creeper's Lab, along with the three Minecraft forums we have here, creepers would crawl through the page. Bring your cursor too close to one, and BOOM! He exploded, taking along with him part of the page. View the demo!
- All pages on the Mega Man PC Website: Dr. Cossack's Lab were replaced by the Mega Man Pretzel. Thanks to Sb20 for giving me the one idea I was missing! See the page!


And now, the stats!!

• 205 items were claimed today!
  
• 8 people have claimed Princess Celestia for clearing all the goals!
  
• Only 1 person managed to do the same thing last year!
  
• At least 2 persons here are bronies!
  
• 0 dislikes were given! What positive people we have!
  
• TopHat kept me awake for over 2 hours as he made sure to find all the items before you!
  
• Over 100 creepers invaded the website!
  
• No one posted in the Anime & Manga forum! Too busy playing with the disabled girls, eh?
  
• 2 new people registered today to access the Minecraft server. Hello confused people!

There's one thing I somewhat regret with those pranks: I need to prepare them in total isolation to get the best reactions from everyone, and I often wish I could share my progress as I go along. I found myself often laughing out loud as I was putting the Ponies theme together! The eventual payoff is totally worth it, of course, and that's when I feel rewarded.

Edited by Dr. Cossack on April 4, 2012 at 13:04:53

I knew I forgot to do something yesterday! Gah! I missed all the fun! >_<

I don't get paid enough for this...

It was closer to a dull thud than a full boom: they indeed didn't explode, just vanish. I didn't have enough time to create an explosion effect that wouldn't look terrible.

They should remove a part of the page on all browsers, though, even if Internet Explorer is a bit more finicky. Did you give them a few seconds to crawl over some different elements?

I enjoyed this one.
The items are still up. Are you planning something?

Because he took the time to get all the achievements last year! You know, that thing you didn't do?




They amuse me. I'm thinking of the best way to make them a permanent thing; in the meanwhile, I'll keep on display the ones that people have already earned!


With that said, I ran a code update tonight. You can now go to view your list of items and use the included checkboxes to check your favorites. Those will be moved to the top of the list when displayed next to your posts, so you can have your Celestia, Hat, Rin and Rainbow Dash always visible!

Edited by Dr. Cossack on April 3, 2012 at 0:31:47

As you guessed, it's an autosave. You probably still have old files in your browser's cache, though, so it might not work until you do a full refresh. Press CTRL-F5 in most browsers!

Edited by Dr. Cossack on April 3, 2012 at 7:12:42

Hahaha, I finally figured out something odd about the server's logs for that day!

For some reason, I received a lot of hits coming from Reddit. I was able to track down the source to a single post that basically goes "WTF those aren't Mega Man X PC games". They offered a link that goes to my list of games playable on the PC. This isn't surprising since it ranks high up in search engines, but I didn't understand how someone couldn't find the information he wanted there.

Then it hit me this morning. They looked at the page on April 1st. They faced the Pretzel. And got seriously confused as a result!

I can imagine...