OMG pInK pOnIes here to stay
Every once in awhile, a small tweak on how you do something gives you unexpected results. One of the April Fool’s joke we pulled on the Ubuntu Forums has caused some interesting things to happen. Matthew explains it better in this post.
From Matthew: FYI to all readers. This forum was originally called the Backyard, as you can see from the rules. The name was changed as a April Fool’s Day joke on April 1, 2008. On that day, the pink text was also added. This amused a lot of people, so we left it like that for a few days, and immediately noticed a change in the tone of posts and conversations in this forum. Perhaps the new, more whimsical name and color have had an affect on members in their posting styles? In any case, for the time being, we have decided to leave it like this. The Backyard is now called “OMG pInK pOnIeS” in honor of the famous Slashdot.org April Fool’s Day prank of 2006 (Google it), and the default text color is now pink, because it has had such a positive impact on posting styles and caused a drastic decrease in the number of reported posts from this forum.
2 Responses so far
April 9th, 2008
1:14 pm
I noticed this with another popular forum - once they changed the forum theme from dark/black-ish to bright white with high-key colors, the mood of new posts changed dramatically. Suddenly the forum became more professional, friendly, and just a smidgin more boring.
I wonder if there’s a field where people study this stuff, little changes in interactive media that influence the way users behave. I know I change wording all the time for my clients, anticipating their complaints when they read “Comments disabled by admin” vs. “Comments have been temporarily disabled. Please try again later!”
April 22nd, 2008
10:53 am
Unfortunately, Googling “OMG pInK pOnIeS” gives reference primarily to the ubuntuforums
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