April Fools

In a number of years on April 1st for April Fools' Day the MetaFilter staff have played some sort of prank or joke on MetaFilter members.

2000 — For MetaFilter's first April Fools, the front page was modified to look like Dave Winer's Scripting News (via archive.org, unfortunately the images don't work).
2001 — Nothing happened, as mathowie ran out of time.

As a belated prank, in May of 2001 mathowie admitted that mefi was populated by Eliza bots, not people with a redirect to sorry.metafilter.com (recap). After the Kaycee Nicole saga unfolded, this joke was taken seriously (via archive.org) (discussion).

2002 — MetaFilter and Kuro5hin merge to form met4filter (via archive.org) (discussion).
2003 — MetaFilter bought by Google (via archive.org) (discussion).
2004 — MetaFilter turned into a wiki (discussion).
2005 — Nothing happened (discussion).
2006 — Nothing happened (discussion).
2007 — Ask MetaFilter shows fun questions (discussion).
2008 — The site's background undergoes a gradual color shift. While the prank was active, it spawned two discussion threads: one and two.

Due to recurring accidents, pb eventually disabled the effect. For the interested, boo_radley posted Greasemonkey scripts to recreate the effect.

2009 — MetaTalk comments are disemvowelled to "reclaim some bandwidth costs."
2010 — Nothing happened, provoking discussion, recursive discussion, and jessamyn's explanation.
2011 — The inaugural episode of the Metafilter Comics Digest podcast (transcript).
2012 — Everyone is staff in MetaTalk.
2013 — Metafilter gets a makeover, like Pinterest with lolcats. Notice, different versions are available at the top left, like Tumblr, ponies, and doggies. Here's a permanent link, and the doggies version. See MetaFilterest for photo attributions.

See Also