Potatoing up April fools day
Instead of fooling around with this site, I thought I’d explain the entire process of how I did my April Fools 2016 joke, by potatoifing my entire server.
I planned to modify the front page of my site, some of the TS3 server, and a good hunk of the Minecraft server.
An important step was to save everything before I made changes. Since I’d mainly be modifying text files, all I did was just save backups of what everything was before I modified stuff.
For the homepage of SCMC, I found just a bunch of potato based images, but left some of “The SurvivalCraft-MC Network” around, especially in the title page, so people couldn’t exploit copyright on April 1, and on the server too. I had to mark that the potato images weren’t mine, obviously. I wanted the front image to be an image from the Washington State potato something, but then again, copyright issues, and the image was “hard-coded” into the theme, still being stored on the mc.owenthe.ninja “CDN” of sorts. I didn’t want to go through a shit load of FTP hacking just to get the front page image to work. The chat widget was easy enough to configure, and I didn’t back that up too, as again, it’s an easy change back to normal.
For the TS3 server, it’s simple enough. Just modifying a few titles was all I did. I modified the music bot to only play troll songs, however, the troll songs were already included in the playlist and music folder, so it was simple enough to get the thing set up to play troll songs.
The MC server was more of a complex task. I wanted to modify the MOTD plugin, slightly modify the information board, and modify ranks. The MOTD was simple enough. Back up the original file before I screwed it up, and switch everything to “The PotatoCraft-MC Network” with yellow, and add some potato based MOTD’s, using yellow as the base color. I did the same thing with the player hover, and personalized messages, including enough potato-based stuff.
When it came to player chat and prefixes, I really went overkill. I backed up the group manager files before doing a find/replace. I replaced all normal player ranks with POTATO, and staff with POTATO STAFF. I only did a find/replace on the base ranks, so if anyone had other ranks, like dev, etc, it’ll still be there, again, I’m lazy. The chat for everyone was turned yellow, I didn’t back up the Essentials configuration, as it would take literally about 1 minute to revert it without a backup.
I also got the potatocraftmc.tk domain, free domains are great! It has pretty much the same DNS settings as our main domain, just the base “potatocraftmc.tk” record just redirects to survivalcraftmc.net. Since most of the records are A records, it takes only 2 minutes to modify DNS, and the domain will get pulled out of service on December 31, 2016.
I didn’t mess around with server listings, as I needed to maintain a good SEO for search engines, explaining why I kept “The SurvivalCraft-MC Network”, and the server listings the same. I only did one joke with minecraft-server-list.com, temporarily advertising it to get a player boost on the server, and for the fun of it. I also left the server icon intact, so people could at least recognize the server that we’re still SCMC.
That’s pretty much how I did April Fools. I applied all of the changes the day before, so I at least could enjoy the day without adding changes at 01:00 on April 1. Just a bad idea.
-owen
