Gibber-gabber
April Fools. Did you get punk’d? I got super rick roll’d
beingzoe almost 4 years ago

So I woke up late. Thus I felt more compelled to get right to work than usual.

Though I had other projects to work on, I was going to check CoTradeCo and maybe post something, then get to work.

I sit down at my computer with my coffee, open firefox, head straight over to CoTradeCo and as the page loads I begin to notice that there are no vowels in most of the words on the page.

Then music begins playing. We don’t have music on our site? Was some other program running?

In my pre-coffee haze I begin to feel anxious.

Rick Astley is singing Never Gonna Give You Up and I begin to see that there are smart ass one liners at the end of many paragraphs on our home page.

Rd, shr, and prmt yr ids nd vntres. As if.

Rd mr n r cmmnts r brwse ll n th cmmnt blg. Yeah Right.

And then I realized…we had been hacked.

Some anti-capitalist Muslim extremist group? The competition hired a hacker? Radical socialist college hackers? Crazy thoughts were racing through my head.

Then sadness, our system was not as secure as we thought. How long was it going to take (distracting from other more pressing work) to fix? How badly had this affected the site? Was the database still clean? When was the last backup?

I immediately rush back into the house to consult Jason, the CoTradeCo programmer who is also my house mate. He is in the shower. Damn.

At that point my brain cleared slightly and I thought to check my laptop and see if it was happening everywhere. The site seemed clear, maybe we weren’t hacked after all. I head back to the studio and open Internet Explorer. Clear there as well.

I brave heading back to our homepage in Firefox and sure enough it is still happening. This time I research further. I look at the source with more scrutiny. Nothing revealing. Then finally I see on the page itself that Google Adwords iFrame actually has a YouTube page in it and it is showing the Rick Astley video for the song. Okay source discovered.

For a moment I considered a virus. I begin looking up the Rick Roll’d term that appeared in the iFrame. Suddenly an entire internet phenomena of Rick Rolling and Duck Rolling is revealed to me.

Rick Rolling is the act of posting an enticing and otherwise seemingly useful link on a forum or other site that takes you to the Rick Astley video. In my state of panic I didn’t get that thorough of a background, and am still unsure whether that was directly related to the missing vowels on the page or not. But apparently the Rock Rolling phenomena is huge now, even entering the real world where entire college basketball games are Rick Rolled by a Rick Astley look-a-like.

In my case though I still wasn’t sure how this was happening. I assumed it wasn’t through the website, and this was confirmed by going to any page on the internet, while the video did not play, the vowels were almost universally missing.

The virus idea seemed more implausible. I then considered a prank, and though maybe it was an add-on.

And it was only then that I realized it was April 1st

But a quick scan of my Firefox addons appeared normal. Then Jason’s girlfriend April (funny for this story) walked in and she revealed that Jason had punked her that morning, making her believe their car had been stolen. Now I was convinced it was him, and the humor was starting to wear off.

Finally after showing Jason the results of his handiwork he admitted he was the culprit.

It was an addon. An evil addon cleverly titled addonmanager.

Now I am bummed for Jason that he was in the shower my intial freaking out was going on. He would have gotten the best laugh out of it, instead he got a really unhappy zoe tersely demanding that he cease and desist.

It was a great prank. Good job. I was freaked out.

Did you punk anybody this April Fools Day? Tell us about it.

Smiley Face image courtesy of sluggerwv at Flickr under a creative commons license.