Did Fark Get Hacked or a Childish Prank?

Drew Curtis, AKA 'Storm' Curtis, May be Having a Bad April Fool's Day

OR is This His Way of Having Fun with 1 Million Daily Visitors?

R A D O K N E W S
Posted: April 1, 2005 8:20am EST
Updated: April 2, 2005 8:09pm EST

While nobody knows for sure with Drew Curtis' Fark.com website, it appears - or is made to appear - that he received a nasty hacking on April Fool's day this morning. Since before 5am EST, the normal list of obscure news stories have been replaced by dressed up guinea pigs and grade school-inspired homepage screens.

While the "It's Not News - It's Fark" website has been known for its antics, including some less intrusive occurrences on prior April Fool's days, it is unlikely that this is one of Drew Curtis' typical pranks - particularly when its paid subscriber section is also affected. And since this is now going continuously all day, it is also unlikely that even Curtis would drag out such a childish prank this long.

Fark, and its fee-based TotalFark, have gone through weeks of intermittent downtime due to undiagnosed server problems. Day after day they have gone through embarrassing outages, noting on the site that it "may be a memory problem," "we're waiting for a new RAID card," or other "don't have a clue" messages.

Many paid subscribers find it implausible that Curtis would spend this much time on such an elaborate prank - rather than spending the past weeks trying to determine the cause of a more important server problem.

Update: As of 10pm EST, Fark is still farked. During the periods when the site works, there are numerous comments which indicate Curtis has been doing this to his own site intentionally - much to the dismay and aggravation of a myriad of regular visitors.

As the more than 1 million daily Fark visitors already know, Fark.com is not a conventional news source - even when it is working. While such a stunt is unorthodox, the site is seldom boring, and now offers a little added publicity they were surely looking for. [Fifteen minutes comes to mind].

Update: The morning of April 2 shows further degradation. The usual frequent news updates haven't changed in more than 14 hours, the Comments are inoperative, and the paid subscription section now highlights an "Internal Server Error" message (below), that states "Either one of us screwed up a CGI script, or someone spilled beer on the server again." At least the guinea pig screens worked fine yesterday...

Update: The silliness finally appears to be over, and the time-wasting, rotating pages have been confirmed to be a hoax. By April 2 at 3pm EST, it appears that all of the site is finally back to "normal"... just in time for hundreds of threads on the Pope's death.

The original April Fool's Day screens are as follows (NSFW):