Classic Website April Fools' Pranks

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With April Fools' rapidly approaching, I remember when April Fools' would practically be its own holiday online, with countless websites coming up with their own twists on pranking their users.

I feel many of these pranks have been lost to time, so I wanted a place to share everyone's favorite pranks done by a website.

My favorite was around 2015, Youtube added a dedicated music button that would just play this song when clicked:

Even to this day, people will name this song when asked what the music in a video is, harking back to this prank.

 

[Not Really Here]

Can't recall who did it, but I remember one site collected the souls of their users with a TOS update.

 

[Whatevermancer]

I was pranked by a certain classic website last year, alright.

 

[TATE MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODE!!]

I know Maddox is a gay bald nigger with aids now a days is a but his old AF jokes were pretty great. This one from 2004 is a classic.

 

[eatler]

A lot of the pranks back then were classics like using cellophane wrap around a door archway so people walk into it, or the old maze games. I remember growing up with AFV if you wanted your prank and funny video fill, It also had a fun intro (do you remember ska?)

I also miss public access. The prank calls were always the best

Since think geek has died as a company, I will place a video from whangs channel retelling the time someone got Canadian Mounties called into their office over an office prank.

 

[Harbinger of Kali Yuga]

imo null should sell mangosteen juice on april 1st

 

[We Are The Witches]

I actually love some of Kiwifarms' April Fools pranks.

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There's some archives, the one from 2022 involved having the site like an old crusty forum filled with ads like such:
https://archive.is/kLZyu

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The one from 2023 had the "gender" flags and Keffals Kiwiler on the banner:
https://archive.is/YfBsU

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But my absolute favourite was the 2021 one, where all of the users' avatars were changed to an anime version. Here, the PFP of @FuckYou was archived and preserved; I got a Chocola PFP:
https://archive.ph/XjHUo

 

[Orange Tabby]

Idk what year (2010s?) but one time DeviantArt changed everyone’s avatar to the Jim Carry Lady Gaga gif:


I can’t remember if you could change it until the next day or not.

 

[The Skeksis Emperor]

A list of all Neopets April Fool's jokes. 2006 was perfect.

4chan merging boards and creating /mlpol/ in 2017 is probably my favorite April Fool's joke ever. Good times.

 

[The Backwards Man]

My favorite was when Path.net tried seizing the Kiwi Farm's hard drives on april fools as a funny prank.

 

[Jason Wynn]

GameFAQS (at least in the late 90s/early aughts when I was active) did April Fool’s jokes. One I remember most is when the site changed its color from blue to green and rebranded every link to redirect to the XBOX board.People had an absolute Chris Chan tier autistic meltdown over it.

 

[and and and and]

The 4chan april fools from a few years ago where they merged several of the boards together is probably one of my all time favorites. The best part was /pol/ and /mlp/ being merged into /mlpol/ and then both boards begged the mods for over a week to make it a permanent addition because all of the pony porn made the fed bots leave for the day

 

[Skeletonized Cow]

But my absolute favourite was the 2021 one

I was very unchuffed with that one because I forgot to save the picture mine changed to at the time.

 

[innocent jogger]

I think it was in 2004 when Suprnova.org (then the most popular BitTorrent site in the world) announced on their home page that, because of most of their users coming from Russia, the site would be in Russian only starting the next day. I actually fell for that until I told my friend and he informed me what day it was and that I was a total retard.

Sadly that one isn't on the Wayback Machine.

 

[Smar Mijou]

I miss when Google used to do the April fools pranks. My favorite was their announcement for an 8 bit NES version of Google Maps.
They also did other neat ones like announcing supposed animal translators, or equating search results in nonsensical terms like how many shakes of a lambs tail it took to find a result, etc.

Unfortunately they haven't done any pranks in a few years though. They're more concerned about cooking up their latest doodle celebrating some nigger/woman/pajeet who did some minor inconsequential thing.

Funnily enough, the Babylon Bee did a great parody/ callout of the Google Doodle BS with their "Indigenous Transgender Water-Skier" bit.
Of course, because reality is clown world nowadays, not even 2 weeks later Google had a doodle up celebrating some Jewish troon sex workeron their homepage, and a few days later, another one, celebrating a literal niggerfaggot who died from AIDS.

 

[Pedophobe]

I think it was in 2004 when Suprnova.org (then the most popular BitTorrent site in the world) announced on their home page that, because of most of their users coming from Russia, the site would be in Russian only starting the next day. I actually fell for that until I told my friend and he informed me what day it was and that I was a total retard.

Sadly that one isn't on the Wayback Machine.

That reminded me, some time after that popular torrent site EzyTV changed all their links to RealMedia files for April Fool's Day, a decade or more after RM stopped being a thing. Confused the heck out of a lot of people.