For the fifth year, 49erswebzone.com had a little fun with the fans on April Fools. Did you fall victim to the pranks?
Once again, 49ersparadise.com joined us in causing chaos. This year, we created two false stories and linked them from the front page of the site. The veterans of this site's forum even tried to join in the fun. Expecting an April 1st gag, they prepared to go along with whatever story we put out there and even had some interesting guesses on what they thought the story would be. Everything from moving the team to trading for linebacker Lance Briggs.
The first story was the trade with the Houston Texans for wide receiver Andre Johnson that appeared in a fake online newspaper site called the Houston Examiner. No, Andre Johnson is not a Niner. We said that wide receiver Arnaz Battle and a number of picks were dealt in this trade. Other stories accompanied this article making obvious it was a fake...unless you were one of the many that did not read the whole thing. The full article can be read here:
The second story came from another fake newspaper site called the Sacramento Tribune Online. This one said that 49ers owner John York would be turning the team over to his son, Jed, at the finale of the 2007 season. It was also complimented by smaller fake news blurbs. This article can be viewed here:
Had you examined these pages closer, you would have been able to notice all of the other fake content outside of the articles themselves.
However, the fun did not start there. We messed with users' minds a bit in the forum as well. Moderators became well-known banned users. Most member's post count indicators (the red bars) vanished as we set the minimum requirement for red bars to 6,000 posts.
April Fools everyone and thank you for having such a great sense of humor once again!
Past April Fools stories:
Packers agree to send Javon Walker to San Francisco (2006)
