Greenlighter.org is dead! Long live Greenlighter.org!

The hoax went down from the start with Wabler making a thread on the SomethingAwful.com forums. We had numerous people brainstorming ideas on how to spread a rumor around the net, and eventually came down to Greenlighting. I originally thought the idea was stupid and would never work, and instead vouched for a UFO idea, but too many projects fail because there’s so much arguing or discussion that nothing ever gets done, so when Wabler decided that the Greenlighting idea(although we hadn’t come up with the name Greenlighting at the time) was the best one I went along and was placed in command. Two more brainstorming posts later and a many conversations on AOL and IRC led to the creation of GL.org, a FYAD like board meant to mix the stupidity of the internet with a believable community of Greenlighters., and the operation was moved completely off of SA to IRC and the Wookiefetish forums. Whether we created a believable community is debatable, but because we have 980 registered users and several posts by dumbfounded newbies we had deceived a few people into actually signing up. All in all the forum had 2.3 million hits and a little over 11,000 posts over 3 days by our fake community. But in end our efforts to get our old SA threads deleted and possibly because of some SA posters themselves someone took screenshots and infiltrated our IRC channel. Although the hoax was first revealed on MetaFilter, hardly anyone took notice so the prank was able to move on.

What do I think about this in hindsight? I never really expected ANYTHING to come of it, but as we got more and more SA support and an awesome fake community going I got very hopeful that we would at least appear on Snopes, or Wikipedia as this case would have it. Our biggest mistake was having our old threads still around, and although we reported them to the admins, they were not deleted. Overall the prank was great fun and the laughs I’ve gotten from exceed anything I’ve ever seen or done on SA. The cleverness of our posters on GL.org proved for me at least to be an even funnier parody than FYAD, and whether the forum will go on is being decided. I’m still not sure I would like to participate in something as time consuming as this any time soon.