If you can read this, SHUTDOWN E2 (idea) by Nanosecond
I don't know if this is an April Fools joke or something, but it seems that idiots have broken into E2. If you're a God, shutdown the site as soon as possible and fix the security hole before bring it back up. They've altered the xp system, have access to the mysql database, and are posting garbage writeups. I write this in a writeup because I am borged and cannot communicate.
I hope the gods intervene....
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I just love that nanosecond thought to put his message both forwards and backwards. Yay for resourceful noders!
I was the evil H4X0r named I_0WnZ_yEw. I tried my best not to write inflammatory stuff to other noders, but I kept going on about how a AOL could hack this place. Instead of noding trollish stuff, I just captured all the text on one screen and posted it under many different node titles. Thanks to someone who has some additional powers, IOU the 'L33t Hacker ended up with 2.2 million XP, which shot him to the top of the Everything's Best Users list.
When I appeared as good old reliable Rancid_Pickle, I had someone borge me so IOU could take the credit. Actually, everything that happened IOU took credit for. When E2 slowed down because of bandwidth, IOU took credit for it by saying he started searching for the letter "e" in the database. When the editors said they lost editor powers and could not delete the troll writeups, IOU said it was his handiwork.
Now, for some funny items. There were many folks who /msg'd poor old I_0WnZ_yEw and told him what they thought of him. Straight from the chatterbox comes these fresh messages:
The events of last night threw us mid-level noders into panic and disarray. Here are snippets from the Chatterbox, interspersed with exerpts from the e-mail I sent dem bones, out of concern that the damage would be very hard to repair. All has been edited for clarity, flow, and maximal irony.
<AndyAnime> What's this about an April Fools JOke?
<Cletus the Foetus> Five hours of chaos. Pure chaos.
<Lord Brawl> Hey folks, all will be explained shortly. Normal operations are restored. Do not panic.
<RACECAR> please share CtF.
Bones,
I don't know how fast news travels, but at around midnight server time, chaos broke out.
<Cletus the Foetus> First, the writeups started appearing in sdrawkcab or in leetspeak. Random percentage chance, went away on a refresh. Nothing horrible, looked like the Blockstacker style.
The first thing everyone noticed was that, as writeups would load on the page, they'd be changed. Some were translated into élite-speak; some were printed so that the letters ran from right to left, although the links still worked properly. It didn't happen all the time; there seemed to be a percentage-chance on every load. We were puzzled, and amused; this would be just the sort of thing that the Blockstackers might organise. Harmless April Fool's Day pranks.
But then there were other things.
<Cletus the Foetus> Then, a number of trolls appeared. They started spamming the chatterbox and the New Writeups with some of the stupidest, most innane and downright /obscene/ stuff you'd ever read.
<Cletus the Foetus> The editors claimed to be powerless, saying that their controls had been crossed; a Kill had become a C!, a Curse had become a Bless, and so on. Some editors declared that their accounts had been broken into.
<LightHouseGirl> Hey everyone. I'm glad I didn't post my first post yesterday! haha
They claimed to be taking over Everything on behalf of the Stiles Project. I thought this was funny, and created the nodeshell "April Fool's Day StilesProject Invasion."
The creepiest part was that the trolls could do impersonations. One was called "jesicapierce" (one S), another was called " nate" (with a space in front). It was around this time I decided it might be wise to take names.
Normally, this wouldn't be something the editors couldn't handle -- except that all of a sudden, the editors couldn't use their commands. An attempted Kill became a C! They attempted to use opcodes directly and that wouldn't work.
Evil Catullus created The War Room, a new room where we could all reconvene and try to figure out what was going on. If it was a joke, nobody was in on it. I told them all that I was keeping track of the names.
It was around this time that I, as well as everyone else in The War Room, was Borged.
<Cletus the Foetus> A post in the name of DMan appeared, taking credit for organising the attack by getting trolls from Stilesproject and Slashdot to invade and ruin our database. A writeup by Dis corroborated this.
Then, under April Fool's Day StilesProject Invasion, a writeup appeared under DMan's name. It took credit for organising the attack, claiming that trolls had been invited from Slashdot and the Stiles Project specifically for the purposes of this attack, which had apparently been months in the making. Although this node was destroyed quite quickly, Jurph's daylog April 1, 2001 can confirm this. Also corroborating is Dis's writeup under If you can read this, SHUTDOWN E2 (which node was originally Nanosecond's futile attempt to get the attention of anyone in power).
<Cletus the Foetus> One of the leaders of the group, a creature called I_0wnz_yew or something, claimed that he had been studying the opensource for the Everything engine and that he could hack it. Nobody believed him until he gave himself 2,000,000 xp. We were afraid.
Many people still thought this was a joke, and left, expecting E2 to be back to normal when they logged on again. General Wesc declared that he was emptying all his writeups and that he was leaving E2. When I pointed out to Sylvar that his "Kills" were actually C!ing the horrible troll crap, he said:
<Sylvar> I give up. This place has become unmanageable. If anyone wants to use my account, feel free. The password is NoloCreo. Have fun.
<bigmouth_strikes> Cletus...how many trolls did you count to last night ?
<Cletus the Foetus> I counted 20 trolls, and I had a further list of others suspected of being involved.
<blowdart> No no you were suckers :)
<Jinmyo> Team Jet-Poop is at work on a node about this. Cletus, you should post your own history.
<Cletus the Foetus> In panic, I e-mailed dem bones, recounting the tale in gruesome detail. No reply; it seemed that the Edev crew was out partying or somesuch. And it looked like Everything was doomed.
I'm still online, five hours later, and no one can reverse the damage. Rancid Pickle's been on for not quite an hour, and he still doesn't believe that nobody's in control of the situation.
Here's a list of the trolls that appeared specifically for the purposes of the invasion and who contributed to the significant damage. Just peruse their writeups to see what I mean.
I_0WnZ_yEw HA4prl1HA <-- The one who posted the first message which served as a warning of the onslaught which was about to begin JayStile <-- Possibly the actual owner of Stiles Project; I care not to speculate largo <-- Another (or possibly the same) haxor nate <-- Now this one caused us much confusion myBUTTyourFACE I'm/a/dick Phone Sex Fairy jesicapierce <-- This one was not even a very good impression, unless the real Jess is somehow a sex-starved whore Sophana Peters The Easter Bunny The Corinthian Ulrich Lock sloppyjoe <-- A self-proclaimed super-genius with a 160 IQ, don't ya know 39145 cloudbuster Zartacla Mrs. Robinson <-- She kept insisting that we were the weakest links. MOM_OF_GORTICIAN <-- This one's role was primarily to make stupid comments in the chatterbox, rather than to actually do any damage by trying to flood the database with crap nodes.
Finally, some noders who deserve mention, either because they helped out, or because they did stuff that made the situation worse but by accident. dannye screamed at the trolls like nobody's business, and though it didn't work, he seemed honestly to be doing what he could. As I already mentioned, Evil Catullus tried to organise some resistance. Poor newgirl, a newbie, was caught in the crossfire. xmatt, at one point, made a really suspicious comment that made it sound like he was behind some of the trolling, but he made that comment before some of the worst stuff happened and he claimed later that it was in jest. And Infinite Burn had created a new account, Infinite Bum, with which to annoy everyone, but later apologised; this was before the actual trolling began.
But I guess the joke's on me.
Now that the chaos is over and everything's becoming clear, I think it'd be cool to know which trolls were whom. /msg ctf if you're one of the trolls on the above list, and tell me who you really were. It was an amazing prank, and in retrospect it was a lot of fun. It's things like this that live in the Everything User Consciousness for ages.
"It's a thin line between comedy and a hostage situation" - Rich Hall
Now that, I've had a chance to sleep,I realise that this whole episode was rather hysterical. I admit, I was really suckered in. I even changed my password in fear (to "fuckyouhacker"). I think I only got an inkling when the troll largo said "gotta go,my parents are unplugging my 'pooter".
Let's consider what we've learned:
I personally can't think of any other place on the web where I would have done anything than muttered "fucking trolls", and moved straight ahead.
I suppose in some ways you could postulate that the real success of this prank was that it made us glad to have the editors.
Now let's never speak of it again.*
*Unless of course, Bones is giving out to you for your new Vegetables that I have had in my ass node. Then fell free to say, "yeah, well where were you on April Fool's Day?!?!?"
What isn't hilarious is the way that some of the editors and Gods handled the response to this. A couple apologised and listend to people's conerns. But some decided to laregly ignore the feeling of the average Joq Q. Noder, told them to get over it and thenm unleashed the EDB when they got annoyed. I'm sure there will be millions of flames noded then quickly nuked on this topic. I just want to take this little corner of the nodgel to say:
I'm really disappointed.
But alas, hindsight is 20/20 and there was much reason to doubt.
My final thought on this prank was to wonder what would have happened if a group of users had gotten together and planned this prank. Would the editors and gods have laughed and let it go on, or would they have started nuking and killing accounts? I'm willing to bet it's the latter.
Having participated on websites that have been the targets of trolls, sockpuppets, and nastiness, I could not see the humor in it.
I'll get over it, but I think the Gods should apologize to those of us who were afraid that their special place was gone forever. There's a note about DMan that says (I paraphrase) "He made E2 a darker, less friendly place, put blood in the water theme, made trolling more common."
Last night, the Gods did the same thing.
I'll live. I'll keep noding, keep chatting, keep expanding and improving my homenode. But when real trolls come in, when the gates need to be guarded and the molten lead poured down the battlements, there is going to be a little less trust in our leader's judgement, a little hesitation in the Hierarchy of Angels.
In regards to Gamaliel -- I have high respect for you, as you and others probably know. I consider you a mentor, and your statements have the same weight to me as Dannye's. One statement in your w/u encapsulates, to me, what went wrong with the prank. "...the mere presence of Stile was enough to mix things up a bit and strike fear into the hearts of the newbies.....". When I was new here, I was scared anyway, hoping for approval, creating pathetic nodes about noding, whining in the Cbox, being a newbie. If last night had been my first time here, I wouldn't have come back, and I feel both I and E2 would be poorer for the experience.
I don't deny that the Heirarchy needed to blow off some steam. Let me make a suggestion. Next year, invade /. or The Stile Project, or someplace that deserves it.
1'11 g3t 0v3r 1t.
I was Sophanda Peters.
My initial idea was to imitate the writing style of certain High School Students who reveal entirely too much about themselves on the web in a semi-literate manner. I actually spent several days preparing my character, perusing the entries at diaryland.com and deciding whether or not she'd abbreviate 'u' to you before coming up with a truly obnoxious stream-of-consciousness writing style that mimicked the speech patterns of the "bad" girls I knew in High School. I did not stop there; I gave my character a real name (Amber), slapped together a terrible webpage and gave her a hotmail address then created notes on her background and history to make sure that I did not give contradictory information in any of her writeups. Although most of her writeups were winged, quite a few were created as early as three days in advance including "why you shouldn't give head on a black sofa". And I will admit, it was fun to play this nearly mindless vulgar little bimbette.
And the first wave of the prank was fun. A little chaos after spending so much time imposing order was a nice way to let off some steam. And being in on the entire prank, I was able to see how cunnningly crafted some of the Editor-trolls were, although many were loud and in-your-face some were quiet and disturbingly clever. And the Editors and Gods played straight men shockingly well and Dis even went so far as to set himself up as the scapegoat for the entire thing. Hypotheses popped up as to what was really behind this ranging from it being a huge joke played on the Content Editors by the Gods to it being an actual invasion by Stile and company again to it being just an unfortunate result of our being slashdottted.
At first, the chaos was amusing and I enjoyed watching people guess what was really behind the insanity, but then it stopped being fun. It stopped being fun when people were actually getting panicked. It stopped being fun when users became offended and upset. It stopped being fun when people I consider friends came to me for answers and for the sake of the gag I purposely provided misdirection and outright lies. To those people, I apologize profusely, I have always considered myself a dependable guy but understand if you people have trouble trusting me after this.
In the end, I hope that no one was seriously hurt or offended or angered by this. There was no real malice intended. We just meant to have a little fun and did not realize that the "fun" would get so out of hand. The revels are over and we have taken off our masks and gone back to the task of cleaning up the mess we have made. Our only hope is that you will not begrudge us our night of madness.
Next, the node I H4XX0RED E2!! appeared, posted by user "HA4pr1HA", so I posted a reponse explaining my obsverations to date. I updated the writeup periodically throughout the night.
Well, clearly this was some of sort of April Fools day joke, and it was more elaborate than I had thought. The trolling started with largo, Sophanda Peters, and JayStile. Now, I don't know everyone E2 so I assume that maybe they were newbieish users, which would make sense considering the Slashdot article a while ago. But that so many clueless newbies would show up all at once and spew such garbage? Hmph.
I went to #everything and found Infinite Burn concocting ways to join in the mayhem, including his own troll node idea, I didn't do it. I posted a suggestive message hinting that maybe I was involved in the chaos. At this point I was fairly sure that either someone purposely being a troll, or 3 or 4 IQ-challenged friends has stumbled upon E2. The alleged loss of editor powers seemed to be the missing link, though. I guess I should have suspected, at that point, that something was amiss. Truly, though, my first notion was that it was bunch of E2 regulars having fun at everyone's expense. I honestly never suspected to the editorship of E2 would stoop that low. I guess I know better now.
As the evening progressed, noders who were not in on the gag in #everything began to suspect a hack. People were getting frustrated and worried. Many fully believed that it was not at all a prank and that E2 had really been broken into by some semi-competent hackers.
I peronally know how such people work, and E2 is high-profile enough that someone might have deemed it worth their time. The people really DID seem to have a deeper understanding of E2 than most would, and as such I suspected that maybe they had just spent a week or two browsing and understood the concepts behind it.
I went to sleep around 1:30 AM EDT thinking that E2 had been hacked, to some extent, and that hopefully order would be restored by morning. Indeed it was, and only then did some of the editors break the news that everything, from the changing of the XP to the near-panic of some users, had been part of the prank
I would agree that it went too far, and some people got a seriously misfigured idea of E2. But things like this build character, and I think E2 will be better off having lived through this.
How many times can one cry wolf on E2? Once, apparently.
Last night, I was finishing my income tax return, and decided to pop over to E2 for a breather. It was just after 0000 UTC. I was surprised by what I saw. Trolls up the wazoo. I didn't need this, and went back to the taxes, but left an mIRC window in #everything open.
A bit later, two hours or so, I was done, and decided to take a look at it again. It looked bad. Then something told me that it was too neatly done. Every single user's last login date was on July 2, 2001. Why, in the world, would HAX0R5 do that? So I used my edev cilia, and within two minutes, discovered that the Content Editors and Gods had not hid their plans well. Normal users wouldn't see much even if they found the planning area, but edevites will find that node quite...interesting, when the proper tools are applied.
I chatted with chromatic a bit about it. I saw that some elements of The Power Structure of Everything 2 were getting to blow off steam (which they could use, I was aware -- plenty of sewage flows through these hallowed walls on a daily basis), and began ensuring I had put my returns together properly. I looked up at #everything and realized, instantly, that there would be a backlash. I thought about revealing the truth, but decided the damage was already done, and that those in on the prank may as well get their full money's worth from it. Of course, if things were different, would the prank ever have happened?
April 2, 2001: It appears some higher-up unveiled their previously-veiled plans at Suggestions for E2 April Fools Pranks. Learn how it all got started. Later: It's gone now. So much for that. Oceania have always been at war with Eastasia. Or perhaps not. Updates may appear later.
