I like free stuff too. I never have much luck with these haha.

by the looks of the news comments n many of them are going out at all. And those that do are empty

Oh Subeta. You are really so predictable

I just saw that. /Sigh

Seems to be fixed now. The pool had gone dry and Amber had gone to bed. I have resumed my spamming ways and gotten about 150 boxes. Actually got a couple wishlist items and some cash shop things. lots of junk, too.

Hey, we barely managed to fix the lag, so let's add Forum Boxes, a TS restock, and the Rift to the site and see what happens!

hahahaha you do make me laugh!

Hey what are we doing for April 1? My one and only idea is to double up the words with double letters. So like... letter would become letttter

Of course, that would take a brilliant coder to figure out.

: We could make up a fake Elwood gift and post it to the news before the real one goes up.

We could also test out a brand new mobile interface again like we did last year. Maybe one where the default text is so large that you can only see a few letters at a time? 👿

we could turn ourselves into Neolodge or Pokelodge

... or all of them: SubetaNeoPokeGaiaLodge. We're expanding!

Create a poll for a new site name with wacky names.

Yeah, I'm bad at April's fools stuff...sigh.

: (re: "wacky names") Heh. For quite some time now, I've toyed with the idea of writing a parody of this site, but haven't found the time to really pull it together.

In the first installment, our peripatetic traveller happens upon the Village of Seabutter. Hungry and tired, he stops at the Root Cellar Inn, looking for a meal and a place to sleep. He sits down in the restaurant and notes there are two young bears running around unsupervised -- not a good sign.

After a few minutes, a waitress comes out. She's also a bear. In a low voice, raspy from years of cigarette abuse, she says, "Welcome to Seabutter. I'm Puppette. What'll it be tonight?"

The traveler asks for a menu, and she pulls one out from the waistband of her uniform. "Here ya go. Call me when you're ready."

He looks at the menu and is horrified by what he sees: the restaurant sells bodily waste as food! There's a Vomit Nasty Pasty. a Poop-Filled Cannoli, something called Booger Fruit, and a whole array of other inedible items. He calls the waitress back.

"This is a joke, right?" he asks. "You don't expect me to eat vomit and poop, do you?"

Puppette looks at him oddly and says, "Of course not, hon. You feed it to your pets."

"YOU FEED THIS TO YOUR PETS? Ewww! Anyway, I'm here by myself tonight. Can you bring me the people menu?"

"Suit yourself, sug." She produced a second menu. This time, the traveller didn't see where she pulled it out from.

He opens it and gasps. As he runs retching from the restaurant, he whimpers, "I didn't mean food made FROM people!!!!"

oh thank you for the laugh!

--

Glad you liked it. I've been thinking on this for a long time.

In the second installment, the traveller walks into the local bank to cash in a traveller's check, but is surprised by how loud it is at the bank. Turns out it's always loud, because of the crowd of people lined up just next door.

The traveller looks outside, and indeed, there's a line of people all waiting to push a big red button that says "RANDOM". He asks about the button, and the teller answers with a canned quote from the sales brochure. "Random is the super easy game where you just click the button below, and something cool happens! You always win something!"

In disbelief, the traveller watches the line of people a little longer. Someone would push the button and collect a free bag of money! Then the next person would push the button and collect a free bag of money! Occasionally, they'd get something that wasn't money, and he couldn't quite figure out what people would do with so many scarves and scimitars in the village. Finally, he got up the nerve to try it himself.

So he got in line. He was pleased to discover that even though the line was long, it moved very quickly, so that within just a few minutes, he got his chance to push the big red RANDOM button. He pushed the button, and sure enough, a bag popped out of the slot. The bag was heavy -- he looked inside and didn't recognize the local currency, but there seemed to be a lot of it. He decided he didn't need to cash that traveler's check after all.

He walked back into the bank to ask about the currency. "Sea Pesos", answered the teller, "but every one says sP for short. Looks like you got quite a lot of them! Would you like to open an account?"

The traveller decides this might be a good way to keep his Sea Pesos safe, so he agrees. He finds out that there were over 8000 sP in his bag, enough for a couple of meals -- but not at that horrid restaurant! -- and that he could push the RANDOM button later that day and get even more sP. The traveller wondered how this was possible.

"Okay, I've opened up your account. Here's your debit card. Welcome to Seabutter!" chirps the teller in a pleasant but rehearsed tone.

"Thanks! How much interest does the account pay?"

The teller's eyes get really wide and her skin blanches and she crouches low to the counter, as if the traveller had said something gravely offensive. "We don't say the 'I' word around here," she whispers, as if giving a warning. "Don't let Morty hear you!"

"Really? Why not?"

"Here in Seabutter, we don't give away something for nothing. Free money just for having an account? That would completely wreck the economy!"

The traveller looked out again at the line of people next door and sighed.

LMAO

Now you have me doing it. I'm imagining sitting back on my , eating and sending off my beloved pampered pets to toil away in the mines so I can afford to buy them tasty excrement delicacies.

: Yup. And if they don't behave, you'll zap them and turn them into hideous monsters. And you'll force them to do battle. Y'know, because we're all animal lovers around here.

April Fool’s idea - Shutdown our site for a day with a page that says we’ve closed up.

What if people saw a news post at the top of the page that appears to be from them -- their username and avatar? (This wouldn't be terribly hard to rig up.) That is, if "smith" logged in, the news post would appear to have been posted from smith's account.

What would you put in a fake news post?

that one was done already (can't remember what year though)- panic ensued :D - even caught me for half a second even though I was staff and knew it couldn't be real.

It would have to be something really silly and eye catching, because otherwise they probably wouldn't read it or even notice it was from them.

Oh....maybe...I don't know how difficult it would be, but...

"Congratulations! You're our 10,000,000 site visitor!"

Click this button to claim your prize - then keep them pressing that button with silly stuff - like the currency converter. Errors, one moment please, 504 error, etc.

It was 2015 when Georgie posted the "we're shutting down the site" message. A few weeks later, she invited new staff members to join and that's how mayla, Marlboro, and I got in.

Right after that, Subeta announced made gallery hoarders a scapegoat for all the lag on the site, announced that they were going to screw with our galleries, and OF COURSE THAT FIXED THINGS AND THERE WAS NEVER ANY LAG AGAIN. Which was how we ended up losing Eric. (And if I hadn't just accepted this exciting new commitment, I probably would've lost interest by now, too...)