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Doctacosa
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Quote"Time leads us. Time governs us. The passage of time is the key."
These are the words that welcomed you yesterday as you visited the board. A cryptic message for sure, it had a hidden message: "come back again several times today, things will change as time moves forward". Surely enough, it did! As the day advanced, the prank hidden within the message board's software caused the posts to become more and more corrupted, up to the point of becoming completely unreadable!
Here are screenshots taken from my test board, showing the 8 stages of changes to the board. All times are in Eastern Time, the site's reference.
- Stage 0 - before the event: Sample post before the text was corrupted
- Stage 1 - from 0:00 to 4:59: Some words were replaced
- Stage 2 - from 5:00 to 8:59: 1 letter out of 8 was removed from the text
- Stage 3 - from 9:00 to 11:59: The text was displayed using Juno's Pretty Purple (c) color
- Stage 4 (with highlight) - from 12:00 to 14:59: Everything was enclosed within spoilers tags
- Stage 5 - from 15:00 to 17:59: All text was written ALL IN CAPS
- Stage 6 - from 18:00 to 19:59: Entire sentence blocks were written backwards
- Stage 7 - from 20:00 to 21: 59: All letters were shifted by 13 characters (A => N, B => O, etc.)
- Stage 8 (with highlight) - from 22:00 to 0:00: All effects combined!!
If you knew how the text was modified, it was more-or-less possible to read back the posts, even up to the end. If you didn't knew it, though... tough luck!
That's not all! Visitors with a keen eye could also spot the following:
- Everyone was displayed as being an administrator, even though no user ranks actually changed this year. Sorry to disappoint you!
- The time displayed everywhere was replaced with an actual, working Swatch Internet Time display. It was buggy for a part of the day, when I realized the mistake and fixed it.
- Several words had been exchanged to make any attempted discussion much more difficult.
Among the words replaced, "Edited by Dr. Cossack" became "Censored by MOTHER RUSSIA", "You" was switched with "I", "April's Fools" became "October's Idiots", and more. As a result, simple sentences such as "I don't understand, could you rephrase that?" became "You don't understand, could I rephrase that?". As an extra catch, the word "time" became "Dr. Cossack". Anyone quoting the tagline would have ended up saying "Dr. Cossack leads us. Dr. Cossack governs us. The passage of Dr. Cossack is the key." On an hilarious note, somebody in the RPG was wielding a "Sword of Time". This one, of course, became a "Sword of Dr. Cossack".
I was expecting more people to post early on and running into a wall of dissonnance with these replaced words, but most people chose to stay quiet until things were getting much worse. Still, I'm satisfied with the end result!
And now... Stats!
- 3 times as many people as usual visited the Interordi.com homepage yesterday!
- 1 person accused me of pulling a weak April's Fools prank... but he didn't even see what was really going on with the board!
- Only 1 person mentionned the "Administrator" status that every one had!
- The user who got the first place for using the largest part of the site's bandwidth yesterday was a russian-based crawling bot!
- The user who came in second place... was none other than myself! You're being watched!
- 1 person used the mayhem to swear publicly!
So? Got your mind back on track already?
If you want to see some extra discussion and comments, you can also check out this topic in the Chit-Chat forum.
The admin formerly known as Dr. Cossack.
I post musings, images and nonsense on Tumblr! I play games on Steam! Add me on either/both, and don't hesitate to ask if you want to play something with me!
"There are only three things certain in life: Death, taxes, and Teej's obsessions." ~ RisingDragon (still true in 2019!)
Darn you jobs! They were probably the reason why I forgot about it...
