EBay-style premium listings!

I think we could all use a little help with a variety of functions when we are composing questions and answers.

We'd need to generate several static images, and display them:

• randomly when a user is editing a post
• based on either keywords they enter
• based on buttons they press in the markdown editor
• ???

Nice thing is that it could apply to all sites across the board, rather than being programmer/geek specific.

Change all SO rep scores and counts to their binary or hex representations (depending on funny bone inclination).

Tell people it's a permanent change for programmers. Say something like "you spoke and we listened". Write a creative blog post ^[1] to support it. Make it witty and amusing. I'm sure many people here can contribute awesome ideas to such a blog post.

If you have to keep the kids happy then at least keep any tooltip/alt tags as their actual base 10 number values.

Example of the binary version, mocked with Firebug:

I'm not sure how difficult it would be... but how about switching themes between sites? For example, give Stack Overflow the Programmers theme for a day, and vice versa. Or perchance do a three-direction with Stack Overflow getting Programmers, Programmers getting Meta Stack Overflow, and Meta getting normal Stack Overflow. You can then mix and match the sites for different interesting combos. Gaming ↔ Game Development, AskUbuntu ↔ Unix & Linux...

Not all of them have good matches (Seasoned Advice and Photography stand out, although I suppose using Photo's theme with a picture of a delicious meal wouldn't be entirely bad...), and there's nothing to swap between the Beta sites. But I figure, the idea was a mite humorous enough to toss out.

EDIT:
Five-minute mockup for Shog:

Maybe some client-side generated blood-red @-notifications too while we're at it:

Stack Exchange, Inc is going public!

As our show of thanks to you providing all the great content for Stack Overflow, we're allowing you the one time opportunity to convert your reputation points into actual company stock.

This is a one-way transaction and any points converted will be deducted from your reputation and show on your user history and graph as "SOIS buy-in"

And create a page that shows how much stock they would get for whatever amount they want to pony up.

Hide the accepted answer behind an "INSTANT ACCESS TO THIS SOLUTION" ^[1] banner... which vanishes as soon as you mouse anywhere near it.

Or announce a merger with Experts Exchange.

EDIT: Okay, so it looks like I wasn't the only one with ideas around EE. Oh well.

How about adding the moderator diamond ♦ next to the logged in user's name all over the site (only visible to the user himself)?

I've seen a number of people talking about rep, requiring rep for asking, changing downvotes to cost different amounts of rep, etc...

What about if we just decide reputation points were a bad idea and drop them altogether?

No more rep shows up. Anywhere. Could be done pretty easily using CSS. Combined witha blog post about how wrong we all were this whole time, and our new grand vision for an "everyone is equal, every question and answer equally good!" StackExchange.

To clarify, that's the joke. Rep doesn't actually go away, it's still here and works exactly the same as always. So I'm not proposing to change how Rep works, just pretend it's gone.

Facebook integration.

Cover the sites in advertisements for the upcoming movie ^[1].

Take the "Stack Overflow Is You" motto to the extreme and instead of a Stack Overflow logo at the top, have a logo that is "n overflow" where n is the user's name. Adding the User's Gravatar (as recommended by Pekka) seems like a cool idea too (though not if it screws up loading time).

Or, replace all accepted answers' user name and links with Jon Skeet's name and profile link.

People joke that Jon Skeet can answer questions before they are asked.

How about you generate some fake content using Flack Overstow ^[1] and auto post an answer by Jon (or someone else?, maybe the leader in the tag) and date the post a few minutes before the question was asked.

Quora was right all along:

• Unlock favourite/ignored tag editing for all users.
  • +2 rep per suggested interesting topic.
  • All suggested interesting topics are automatically accepted. No exceptions.
• Followers!
  • You can follow people by starring them.
  • +10 per follow.
  • −2 per unfollow.
  • To kickstart things generate many followings at random.
  • Follow at 10 reputation
  • Unfollow at 125 reputation
• Formatting!
  • Markdown is too hard. Get rid of it.
  • Replace it with an intuitive WYSIWYG editor. You cannot see or edit source, because HTML is so web 1.0.
  • Ban evil outbound links outside the site; URL copy and paste ought to be enough for everybody.
• Janitors!
  • Moderators are so web 2.0; get rid of them.
  • Closing sucks; retag instead.
  • Janitors can super downvote: +2 reputation for the voter, −10 for the votee.
  • Become a janitor at 1000 reputation.
• Notifications! Drop down a message every time:
  1. A post of yours was upvoted.
  2. A post of a follower's was upvoted.
  3. A follower upvoted a post.
  4. A post of yours was downvoted.
  5. A post of a follower's was downvoted.
  6. A follower downvoted a post.
  7. A post of yours was accepted.
  8. A post of a follower's was accepted.
  9. A follower accepted a post.
  10. A post of yours was commented.
  11. A post of a follower's was commented.
  12. A follower commented a post.
  13. A new question has been posted since you have loaded the page.
  14. A follower posts.
  15. A post of yours is answered by a follower's follower.
  16. A follower's question was answered.
  17. A follower was followed.
  18. A follower was unfollowed.
  19. A follower unlocks a privilege.
  20. You are followed.
  21. You are unfollowed.
  22. You gain reputation.
  23. You lose reputation.
  24. You would gain reputation, but a cap prevents that.
  25. A follower gains reputation.
  26. A follower loses reputation.
  27. A follower gains reputation, but a cap prevents that.
  28. A follower visits chat.
  29. A follower enters a chatroom.
  30. A follower posts a chat message.
  31. A follower stars a chat message.
  32. A follower flags a chat message.
  33. A follower is followed.
  34. A follower is unfollowed.
  35. A follower adds an interesting tag.
  36. A follower removes an interesting tag.
  37. A follower adds an ignored tag.
  38. A follower removes an ignored tag.
  39. Jon Somebody has started typing an answer for the question you are viewing. ^[1]
  40. Jon Somebody has viewed a question of yours.
  41. Jon Somebody has started typing a question of yours.
  42. Oh, nevermind, Jon Somebody has stopped writing.

I think this year you should customize the April Fool's jokes for each community. Here are a few ideas:

• Stack Overflow - re-skin the site to match the style and layout of that hyphen site.
• English Language & Usage - Run the entire site through Google Translate to convert each question and answer to a random language.
• Unix & Linux - Make people enter answers at a command prompt.
• Seasoned Advice - Add a random spam haiku ^[1] answer to every new question.
• Gaming - You must beat 10 levels of Angry Birds to post a new question.

Accidentally leak your server setup?

There's plenty of room for tweaking the exact links, of course. Entries like adminPanel.htm could link to all sorts of, uh, non-standard mod abilities; for example, a form that lets you punch in a user ID and see who has submitted flags against that user.

This question was answered long before it was asked.

Please Add Means of Converting Reputation to Actual Beer ^[1]

Instill paranoia into the answerers for the day. Make them quiver in fear for the whole day.

When just blindly viewing an unanswered question, have the avatar of the top user for one of its tags (or just the top user for the site, to make it computationally cheaper by bounds) show up in the corner, only to go away quickly or when the mouse approaches.

If the user still has the courage to work on an answer, pop down one of those banner notifications from the top to say the following, substituting a proper username.

Be advised: Nick Craver has just answered this question while you were typing. It is probably hopeless for you to continue. Click here to refresh

Naturally, the refresh will not show anything. It may even show a "Haha!" or alternative point to show off what's going on, if you want to be generous.

For those who already are at the top, pester them with their rivals. Have Marc Gravell hot on the heels of Jon Skeet for every question he looks at. No peace of mind for the day!

Hot. Dog. Stand. ^[1]

/**
 * @author Jon Skeet
 * @author Adam Davis
 */

Display mockeries of infamous ads.

"Punch the unicorn to see if you win 500 reputation!"

"Lose that Google 15 with this one weird dieting tip."

I've had an idea brewing for months and it kind of continues the idea from last year.

Last year we changed everyone's Gravatar, this year, let's change their display name!!!

The idea is that a bunch of first names, last names, and suffixes are collected and then randomly combined to form the user's new name...

Examples:

• William van Smithstern the III
• Dr. Joseph Samuels Jr.
• etc.

I'll borrow an idea from another question ^[1]:

Toolbar additions!

A paywall for all users with 500+ rep for both asking and answering.

Complete with a credit card form (29.98/month) and a link to a blog post outlining why this is totally not a sellout.

Of course, you just have to scroll down to continue!

A notification bar pointing to a breaking story in the blog, written by Jeff or Joel, to this effect:

The Stack Overflow team and the Venture Capitalists funding Stack Exchange have decided to provide additional funds in an unprecedented move to increase awareness of StackOverflow, and encourage participation.

Reputation points can be exchanged to money at a rate of $0.10 per point!

We plan to launch this some time this summer; however we will be beta testing this today until midnight GMT, or a maximum budget of up to $20,000, depending on what is reached first. If you earn 100 rep points or more today, a "claim my funds" button will appear in your user profile. Click it and follow instructions.

All you need is a major credit card, or a PayPal account.

This would be the most hilarious variation of a general "Money for rep points today only!!!!1" idea, because it would keep people on their toes for a while.... If it's not too blatantly obvious.

Redirect randomly between all Stack Exchange sites.

Stack Overflow might wind up on Meta.SciFi, or AskDifferent could be on Unix & Linux.

Or integrate it with a Wheel of Redirects, like the Wheel of Migration that we mods use to decide where to send questions. ^{_{(oops, was that out loud?)}}

How about some fake tag and badge sponsorships? "debugging" could be sponsored by Roach Motel. "Famous Question" could become "XHTML Regex parser". Etc.

Announce that you're closing the sites down because you were bought out by Experts Exchange.

To each question that already has at least one answer, automatically add an answer from Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, Marc Gravell, Jon Skeet, or whoever else is in on the joke. Most of these answers should be terrible, yet appropriate to the question's tags.

• All JavaScript-tagged questions are answered with jQuery-worship ^[1].
• All HTML-related questions are answered by bobince asking if the user has tried using regex.
• All .NET questions get an answer from Jon Skeet suggesting that managed code isn't nearly fast enough for the task, and the user should try writing it in heavily-optimized FORTRAN. Marc Gravell responds with a comment about Duff's Device ^[2].
• Jeff Atwood occasionally pops up to say that he once saw an answer on the hyphenated site, and the user should check over there. He doesn't explain what "the hyphenated site" is.
• Joel Spolsky says something ^[3] wise and insightful ^[4] about the ^[5] software business ^[6] which has absolutely nothing to do with the question.
• Someone claiming to be Eric Lippert promises to bring the user's C# issue up at the next design meeting and create a special language feature to handle it.
• Larry Wall doesn't know the answer to your Perl question, but here's some poetry ^[7] you might enjoy.
• Alan Turing, Donald Knuth, and Charles Babbage answer one question each. Turing suggests "some form of tape-fed computation device". Knuth's answer provokes a flamewar in the comments with Edsger Dijkstra about the merits of goto.

Only questions that already have an answer are affected, so it doesn't interfere with the question/answer process too much. Also, you could restrict it to questions that already have an accepted answer or an answer with a certain amount of upvotes. Obviously, protect the "answerers" from rep loss when "their" answers are downvoted to smithereens.

Make balpha's Commander Keen Downvote ^[1] Script native ^[2].

Allow (fake) protesting of OP acceptance decisions

Add a button right below the green checkmark labeled PROTEST which pops up a message saying you can overrule the OP's decision to accept this answer at a cost of 30 rep points.

If the user accepts, redirect him to a page on the site where the protesting procedure — a clear scam for stealing half the user's rep points — is described, and a confirm button is displayed.

If the user confirms again, say

Thank you. The answer will be un-accepted and your rep points deducted by tomorrow morning.

BURN BURN BURN!!! button

There's a limit to how much exposure to the low quality tab one can handle, after a while, noob-rage starts to take hold, and you start getting the urge to do more than just flag.

It would be cathartic to have a 'nuke' button with some satisfying animation effect to consign the likes of this ^[1] to oblivion, leaving a smouldering pile of ashes.

EDIT Add in a downvote, just to incentivate downvoting on stuff that deserves to die.

^{I'm totally in favor of Commander Keen as suggested by Pollyanna [1], but nevertheless:}

Ask users to participate in "a short" survey, and then continue asking questions until the user finally gives up? (The responses of the first 5 or 10 questions might actually be useful, if the real survey ^[2] needs more data.)

Run the first annual Stack Exchange moderator recall elections ^[1].

You could make everyone think that the sites were hacked by Anonymous ^[1] by replacing every user name with "Anonymous" and every user image with:

Or:

Replace the term "Rep" with "Exp".

I think all the sites should be grayscaled ... not just the metas.

Or better might be to reverse the site colorations, from meta to the host, etc. Too simple, but also easy enough it should be doable.

Have the community user bump/replay all the questions from last year, at the time same time of day that they were asked.

jQuery Overflow.

When editing a question, after entering the title, the red banner (similar to the subjective warning) pops up: "It appears your question is about programming. Have you totally dropped that and tried jQuery?"

Answer editing boxes are pre-fill with "You should totally drop that and try jQuery." (which will automatically go away once the user starts typing, and which won't allow the submit button to be pressed until they start typing, so we don't get this as an actual answer, but it appears anyway).

When a user gets or gives their first up vote of the day they get a special Unicorn badge which links them to this little game ^[1] which is hosted on agame ^[2]

It would of course require you to get permission to use the game but it would be worth it.

Also, add the Konami code for the day and Cornify it up! ^[3]

Launch a Q&A site for Quora ^[1].

I did, in fact, have April 1 in mind when I proposed it.

Every question gets the unicorn ^[1] tag.

Hide the envelope icon and watch the users freaking out, oh.. wait ^[1]..

Some new tags no-really ^[1] and im-serious ^[2] and come-on-you-guys ^[3] to go along with this proposed tag:

jon-skeet-only ^[4] for those times when you only need Jon Skeet to answer you. And it will tag Jon Skeet so he sees your question as a priority item when he logs in. I suppose we could go so far as to introduce some others, for instance grace-note-only ^[5] or pekka-only ^[6]

When you combine the first few tags with the latter one it pushes your tag to the top of the queue. Then there's the response tags:

nuh-uh ^[7] and i-dont-think-so ^[8] and youre-wrong ^[9] (which has synonyms your-wrong ^[10] and yer-wrong ^[11] of course)

And in the spirit of helpfulness: do-not-show-to-jeff-atwood ^[12]

I originally came up with this as a throwaway joke a few days ago, but since you ask...

for(Question q : questions)
    q.deleted = !q.deleted;

You could flip the closed bit in addition to/instead of the deleted bit.

... or perhaps the community wiki bit.

Upgrade CAPTCHAs to test basic English spelling and grammar. Keep the obscured text, so people can't just hook up existing grammar checking engines, but come up with your own images so you don't end up displaying GBLI^24[phi].

Might as well spend April Fool's Day doing some actual quality control. Hm? No, I'm not annoyed by any of the posts I edit on SO, why?

Zalgoize all questions and answers. Or even all text on the site.

Simple version:

1. Make downvotes cost 1/2 the user's rep.

Extended edition:

1. Make downvotes cost 1/2 the user's rep.
2. Display a notification thanking the user for donating 1/2 their rep to the Jon Skeet foundation for terminally hopeless programmers (or some more believable fake charity incl. a link to fake site)
3. Award a funny 'Philanthropist' badge to anyone who loses over 1k rep as a result over the course of the day.

(Recalc at the end of the day, of course.)

Kitten macro every title. Choose a variety of kitten related images that are short and wide, and use them as the background for the question title. Use a modulo of the post number so the same image is served with any given question.

Iconic cat images (leaping through the grass, ceiling cat, etc) as well as moving gifs of dancing cats would give each question just the right spice it needs to encourage more upvotes.

It should also lesson people's stress as they blow past deadlines at work due to their diligence here.

Do Nothing

MSO will be ablaze with users wanting to know what the joke was, expecting Unicorns or other such magic. Doing nothing is not a joke, and yet it is.

(the temptation was strong to put "troll" in this answer somewhere, as in "to troll").

Claim that you have lost all the source code for the last ~2 years and revert the site to its design and functionality as it was at the moment it left the private beta.

I miss close/reopen wars

Announcement of Stack overflow email accounts. Gmail started years ago on April first, and just like taking over ee, Stack Exchange is now targeting google, starting with email.

Similar to personal urls on careers, people would have to claim/reserve their email, so there would be a land ruch on them. We can make their experience more interesting by claiming that the first three names they chose are taken, and recommending jonskeet with a random eight digit number appended.

How about Matrix SO?

Here is a quick demo

javascript:document.body.style.background="url('http://steve.files.wordpress.com/2006/03/Matrix%20tut%202.jpg')";document.body.style.color='white';void(0);

Type this in your browser address bar.

It needs improvement though.

Tag "autocorrect"

How about messing with the tags users choose to apply? For example, any time someone submits a javascript ^[1] question on SO, display jquery ^[2] when the page loads. On Cooking, you could do [butter] → [margarine]; on Unix and Linux, [kde] → [gnome].

Tag confirmation

If the "autocorrect" seems too disruptive to the user experience, add a confirmation page instead, with messages like...

• "Have you tried Eclipse?" for all [netbeans] questions on SO
• "Salad, huh? Do you have any questions about chocolate? C'mon, live a little!" for [salad], [tomatoes], &c. on Cooking
• "Mint, huh? Are you sure you don't want to try a real distro ^[3]?" for [mint] on Unix/Linux

Meta

Meta sites should get to share in the fun! Let's skip all that pesky "discussion" and "thought" for one day by automatically attaching status-declined ^[4] to every post.

Also, there are already some restricted and some required tags on metas. How about deploying new ones? Perhaps "deferred" could become [status-six-to-eight-weeks] and "support" could become [plzsendtehfaqz]? Next year, new restricted/required tags could even sprout up on the main sites!

Cash in on the Twitter revolution by adding a Dickbar ^[1]. Trending topics will keep users of Stack Exchange up to date on current happenings in the Twitterverse, such as what color everyone's underwear is and things celebrities hate. Plus, it's another thing to monetize ^[2].

(Explanation) ^[3]

Only allow comments shorter than 15 characters and questions or answers shorter than 30.

On entering of a special keyword, make everything fall to the bottom of the screen, like this ^[1] (requires Chrome or Chrome plug-in for other browsers). Depends on compatability and viability across browsers.

Since all sites are integrated, "seemingly" pull out information from careers.SO about current employer, send random warning (alert on top, something along the lines of

• "You really should be working."
• "What will the folks at [Current_Employer_Name] think of this?"
• "Suspicious activity detected, contacting [Current_Employer_Name] HR."

How about a blog post to claim that StackExchange has been acquired by Facebook ?

A nice easy one - switch to Sketchy theme for the day :)

I would agree with the answer for anonymous ^[1] user names and user images, but adding also an experiment, by hiding the reputation, tags, recent questions/answers, bio, etc.; basically no Profile/Users pages.

Everything will continue to work the same (unless you will also add some random unicorns.. like everywhere), just nobody will be able to see who is who behind the answers/questions. Every user should be able to see their own points and profile page though, since not showing the votes for questions/answers is not an option as it might affect the overall quality of Q/A that day.

With this little experiment maybe Jon Skeet will stop getting upvotes for his unfinished answers for at least a day.. :) Also it would be fun to see the leagues the day after and how the top users were affected by this. Many believe that high-ranked users are getting more points just because they are high-ranked, so let's put it to a test ^[2].

A site-wide summon (Jon Skeet) button, just like Batman's bat signal. It produces various fun interactions, like:

• a blank answer generated into your question with the text "pending Jon Skeet".

• a message indicating that Jon Skeet is busy at the moment "Please wait while Jon Skeet, finishes his call | returns from the moon | eats his pizza | flushes | etc."

• Show random facts from Jon Skeet facts on meta Jon Skeet Facts? ^[1]

• etc.

(Feel free to update this list with other suggestions).
A designer could have some fun with this.

Vaguely inspired from this ^[1] list.

• Private messaging: let anyone @ anyone (shows in the notification bar)
• Rep transfer: make people think they can transfer rep between sites (provide a fake exchange rate too :)
• Pretend to open-source something, provide code with subtle errors :)
• DIY colour schemes (i.e. not themes, people change individual colours)
• Add some new pluralization bugs
• Pretend to let people buy 'rep-boost' - you get double rep for any upvotes for a limited period
• Temporarily add some esoteric formatting option (<blink> :)
• Something like this ^[2]? (more of an Easter egg than an April Fools)
• Reverse the infamous enter-to-submit-comment functionality, randomly (ducks)

Launch a new SE site for questions pertaining to life as a professional clown

Clown Overflow

Top Questions

• How do you cope with long shifts as a clown
• Recommendations for top quality clown car
• How to tell your family you want to become a clown

Dual Screen Stack Overflow Easter Egg:

Shifted off the main content in the browser window by about 1200 pixels shows all the related and linked questions in a summary view. So the total content is about 2400 wide, the main content on the left half, and the additional content on the right half, with a large enough whitespace gap in between that people won't see it unless they have their window stretched very wide. Pull the browser window open wide enough and you can see the question and answers on the left as normal, and the blurbs for the linked and related questions on the right.

Enabled by konami code or other typical easter egg enabler.

Put an ad on the site. And when I say "ad" I mean AD. One of those skins that are so popular now. Adblock doesn't block it because you actually make it the background image. Maybe an ad for Keeping Up With the Khardasians or something.

Turn SO into an old-skool BBS.

Text mode console screen, preferably black background with white or green text for authenticity.

Would look something like this:

Welcome to StackOverflow. You are logged in as Spudley.
Please enter a command to continue.
Example commands: 'listquestions [active|featured|hot]', 'showquestion <id>', 'askquestion'
Type 'help' for more.

>_

Calculate all reputation values on the site relative to Jon Skeet.

Any other day

Skeet 285,539
Me 6,811

On April 1

Skeet 100%
Me 2.39%

You could throw a client script in place to effect this without affecting the server code base.

Grant everyone the precognitive badge for the day.

Close meta. Link back to uservoice.

It'd take a bit to do, but basically let everyone have diamond moderator privileges and run free. It's a joke that creates itself :)

Of course, you'd want to make a backup before and restore the backup afterwards, as well as put up a banner explaining that any questions asked will not be there tomorrow and also of course explaining that everyone has diamond unicorn powers.

To join in with the Paywall jokes, a Paywall on answers from people with over 1k rep.

But my original idea was instead of "1 other answers" replace it with "Jon Skeet already beat you to it." Or your high ranking username of choice (or even, the username of the people who actually did beat you to it.)

Change the FAQ displayed to new users and claim that all questions must be written as answers as in Jepordy.

Prevent everyone with 10k or more to answer questions until one hour have passed since the question as asked.

Introduce a new feature - answer tagging.

Just like questions, answers can now be given up to five tags.

Put a Katamari button on every page of the site.

http://kathack.com/