Humor
Is Dead Named AOL Time Warner Site of the Year
'Pulsing Votes' Phenomenon Deemed
Legitimate, Vote Counting Abruptly Stopped After 'Scripting' Techniques
Used By Farkers Discovered
4/9/02 - AOL Time Warner corporate
headquarters were "turned upside down" late Tuesday
as all executives, including Colin
Powell, his
son, and
the former Board of Directors, were suddenly called into an
emergency meeting the 'The War Room', the famed location of the
now infamous AOL / Time Warner merger negotiations. The entire
IT staff was also summoned, dropping all customer service lines
in an effort to dedicate themselves to the "poll" crisis.
Official results, as certified
by the message board on fark.com. The award, bestowed
upon Humor Is Dead at an emergency meeting the night
before, was decided by a 5-4 vote by the Board of Directors,
which ordered the counting stopped as of 7:50:06pm Eastern
Tuesday night. |
But by a 5-4
AOL Board of Directors vote, counting of the
reader poll numbers was abruptly halted at 7:50pm Eastern and
Humor Is Dead was declared winner of AOL subsidiary Time Magazine's
Best Web Site. Drew could not be reached for comment.
The trouble
started when AOL's worldwide network experienced sudden, unexpected
outages starting at approximately 5:45pm Eastern. Technicians
were dumbfounded and suspected a vicious hacker attack, a theory
enforced when a troubling e-mail was found sent by a "farker"
- the colloquial name for a fark.com enthusiast, accused www.somethingawful.com
of cheating in the poll.
The discovery,
in the inbox of AOL Chairman Steve Case, caused quite the concern,
and sternly promised, "Our
brands, services and technologies already touch hundreds of millions
of people...we will embed the AOL Time Warner experience more
deeply into their everyday lives."
In the investigation
that followed, a joint NSA/CIA/AOL
task force discovered another farker, whose named has been withheld
but listed with the profile "Beer bOObies beer beer bOObies
bOObies",
Members of Humor is Dead Executive Council pose with their
Time "Site of the Year" Award at the Mothers of
AOL Time Warner Executives' Annual Luncheon Wednesday morning.
Pictured is Humor Is Dead Vice President of Strategic Marketing
Hank "Shwag" Shwagman, Senior Vice President and
Chief Security Officer Arnold McMurray, and Director of Editorial
Content Benny "The Brain" D'Ambrosio. Benny
also serves as Chairman of the Republican Party of Florida
Victory 2002 Organization. |
pointed out that
humorisdead.com too was guilty of using scripts in an attempt to
skew the vote. (for our non-technical readers, a script is a small
program that, in this case, repeatedly submits a vote online.)
Yet another booby aficionado from fark.com, whose bio mentions "I
like South Park, SNL, The Man Show, The Daily Show, The Simpsons,
Futurama, and Family Guy.", rallied the troops, as HID, fark,
and somethingawful began an all out attack on the poll that forced
AOL to temporarily borrow JUNO's servers to keep up.
As for humorisdead.com,
our twenty minutes of dual-computer mouseclick-thumping to the
'pulse' of Rush's "Moving Pictures " was over, and we
went on to other things, namely dinner, at nearly the same moment
the counting was officially called off. Our wrists were somehow
fast enough to edge out the scripting booby aficionados at fark.
A PR rep for AOL Time Warner reported that their poll was in fact
"immune to scripts" and that "only legitimate nerds"
manually voted. As a result, all votes cast using scripts were
disqualified, eventually leading to the decision to stop all vote
counting at 7:50.06pm, Eastern Daylight Time.
