April Fools Day gives me an opportunity to have a little fun with the communities that I manage. For some of them, it’s a bit of a tradition because I have been doing it for so long. Let’s break down what I did this year.

As I mentioned in my last post, we are currently celebrating 10 years of phpBBHacks.com. It just so happened that our 10 days of celebration fell during April Fools Day. So, of course, we had to do something related.

I announced that, after looking through some old documents and e-mails, I had discovered that the site was actually 11 years old and that it predated phpBB itself. In other words, I was saying that phpBBHacks.com, the largest unofficial resource for phpBB, launched before development had even begun on phpBB.

We changed our 10th anniversary celebration pages to mention that we were 11, but kept the celebration going. April Fools!

On PhotoshopForums.com, I pulled out an old standby: the fake administration panel. In the header and footer on every page, a link was added, directing the would be clicker to the “forums admin panel.” In reality, this is just a static page saying “April Fools!”

A member of my staff on KarateForums.com came up with the inspiration behind the prank we pulled over there. Due to high traffic, we would have to limit access to the forums. How would we do this? Every member would only be able to visit the forums two days a week and the two days would be determined by the first character in your username. April Fools!

Finally, on Bad Boy Blog, I posted a joke story reporting that Bad Boy Records would be changing it’s name to Good Boy Records, following name ownership disputes. We put a new logo on the site (that’s it, in the upper right corner of this post) and even registered the domain name goodboyblog.com, redirecting it to our website. April Fools!

Despite being seriously crunched for time, I still managed to set up a few pranks, allowing the community to have a little fun. Did you do anything fun on your community on April 1?