April Fools Day. Some funny pranks:
Whirlpool: Mandatory ISP filtering will block P2P
This one didn’t get me. I was expecting it. Rather funny to see the shocking number of people that fell for it though.
Whirlpool: Aura adjusted.
This one DID get me. I recently have had my aura on Whirlpool on a steady rise from the deep area of “Pervasively Low”, to “Pervasively Normal”, to “Pervasively Low”, to “Pervasively Normal”, and today… “Pervasively Luminescent”. Now that was a shocker, I believed it, because I assumed my aura was rising yet again.
I immediately had a look over the forums to discover “The Pool Room”.. However.. It wasn’t in sight. Oh no! No Pool Room, but very high aura.
I started poking around, and discovered that it was an April Fools joke. Got me good, it did.
SuperTorrents: Advertising.
Not official yet, but I suspect the advertising idea is part of an April Fool’s gag, mainly because they can’t reasonably expect us to believe it costs them more than $5000 USD to host a server in Colocation in the US.
I get 1.2TB on a lowend server for $59USD, that alone tells me that they either use a LOT more than 1.2TB, are with a very expensive provider, or.. are full of.. brown matter.
I suspect the ads to disappear, however, I am appauled by this, it’s no real joke to be shoving enlarge ads in the face of younger children. That’s just not funny. Besides, April Fools jokes aren’t designed to be profit making exercises, and I suspect they do turn a profit from the donations on that site alone. As well as that, my personal 2c is the site is ran by kids, but that’s not really the point here.
The ads themselves are rather intrusive and they serve nothing more but profit raising.
If they go the way of demonoid, a userbase might still exist, but at 1kB/sec for uploads. They would eventually drop the need to sign up to download torrents just to hold on to some users, but the userbase will still dwindle, why?
User won’t upload much. Why would they? There’s no point if you are depending on the userbase to keep coming back to click ads / profit, you aren’t gonna tell them to go away with bans, you basically kiss the cash they bring in .. good bye.
There are better trackers available, such as BitMeTV. But there’s a few reasons to stick with SuperTorrents as well, so I do hope they remove the ads.
Other April Fools day issues:
It seems some kids like to set trashed houses on fire. A house just down the road from us is in a bad state, however, around lunch time today, firefighters were on the scene putting out a … well, minor spark.
Kids need a good kick up the rear, starting fires in houses, even if they are trashed, is a bad thing, the people in the apartment building next to it wouldn’t appreciate being smoked out. That’s no April Fools.
Entertainment value of .. well, you be the judge.