NiroZ
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One of the main problems with April fools is that it only lasts a single day. I mean, imagine keeping to joke going for a whole week! Or better yet, imagine 3 weeks!
Well, imagine no more. In this contest, your goal is to make an outrageous statement in the style of an April Fool's joke. Unlike an April Fool's joke, the statement can be *true* as well as false, but in true April Fools style, it's all about trying to make the most elaborate ruse possible.

Rules
* To enter, you must with the correct formatting. I won't be chasing you up on this, but if it isn't formatted correctly, it won't be listed on the first post of this thread. The correct formatting is to have the the title in bold, the actual statement in blue and any additional information in red (optional) (additional information can be false, even if the statement is true, and vice versa). At the end of your post, [unhidetime=21 April 2007 4:00 AM]hidden between these two tags[/unhidetime], state whether or not your statement is true or not, any evidence you care to submit, and if your feeling fancy, how a person could have discovered the true nature of the statement. Once you have done this, post it in this thread. This time it won't be a submission thread, which means anyone can see and comment on your statement.

* You can create up to 3 entries

* A statement may not be repetition of another statement made somewhere else, i.e. some other website posting an April Fool's joke.

* A statement can, but doesn't need to, be related to DROD.

* An entry can contain images and supporting media, as well as text, if the entrant wants. The same rules for copyright infringement apply to this contest as we normally have on the forum. But please no links to external sources, it just has too many hassles involved.

* Please don't ask Erik for permission to use DROD images. If you want to use DROD image please use images from DROD:AE (all of its media is in the public domain), one of the public domain tilesets posted on the forum, or come up with graphics on your own.

* Voters rate each entry based on the following criteria:
1. The voter's level of interest in whether the statement is true or false.
2. Cleverness and skill of the author in making it difficult to determine statement's truth.
3. How successfully the creator of the statement defends/supports their statement/s in discussion (again, if he/she lies when their statement is true or vice versa is irrelevant).

* Entry submissions will close Local Time:04-14-2007 at 05:00 AM, which is in negative 921 weeks, 5 days. Meanwhile, from the start of the contest right up to Local Time:04-21-2007 at 05:00 AM, which is in negative 920 weeks, 5 days, potential voters can grill entrants. Then, the polls will open, and you can then vote using the above criteria.

Prizes
First place shall receive 100 rank points, and 1 item from the prize pile.
Second place shall receive 50 rank points, and the knowledge that they almost came first.
Third place shall receive 25 rank points, and the satisfaction of coming third.
Anyone who has not tried a contest before gets 10 rank points, no questions asked.
All contestants will receive the thrill of trying to fool the world in this contest.

Tips
* Pick something that people will be interested in. For example, nobody will be interested in finding out the truth to the statement 'I ate cake for breakfast'. A far more interesting statement would be 'In Belgium, 23 bio-gas toilets are to be installed...'.

*Picking something personal is very hard to verify, and is not all that interesting to the voters.

* Don't be vague. Anyone can make a vague statement, and it lacks credibility. The more detailed the statement is, the more believable it is.

* Avoid picking areas where the answer is debate-able, or depends on your point of view if you want to make a true statement.

* Google (and perhaps even Yahoo!) it before you make your statement. You don't want it to be that obvious do you?

* Checkout Blufr or the Museum of Hoaxes.They have plenty of ideas and examples, and the statistics on blufr can be very helpful.

* Avoid unnecessary details. Although it helps make a more convincing bluff, if you have giant slabs of text, people will lose interest.

Good luck!

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[Last edited by NiroZ at 04-11-2007 04:24 AM]

larrymurk
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How do we know this is a real contest and not just an April Fool's joke?

Citrus
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Rank Points: 1229
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Wow, NiroZ, just.... Wow! When are you going to get the title: "Legendary Contest Runner"?

____________________________
Call me Citrus.

Neather2
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Registered: 07-18-2006
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I don't Have Understoount The Contest! Sameone can repeat to me, please?

____________________________
Nothing to say. I just play the game. And you, sir, should play it too.

Conspiracy, my new hold, has just been released.

Chaco
Level: Smitemaster
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Registered: 10-06-2005
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Hey, this sounds a little familiar...

____________________________
Quick links to my stuff (in case you forgot where it was):

Elfstone
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Neather2 wrote:
I don't Have Understoount The Contest! Sameone can repeat to me, please?

Ciao amico - I will try to translate some of this and PM it to you.

____________________________
Winner of: Novice Architect Excellence 2006.
FAPCA - Technical Design Excellence in Layout and Aesthetics

Neather2
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Thanks, but i have translate. I don't have understoont.

____________________________
Nothing to say. I just play the game. And you, sir, should play it too.

Conspiracy, my new hold, has just been released.

Tahnan
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So, to be clear:

* These shouldn't just be things that are maybe true, maybe false, about ourselves (e.g. this post)?

* The statements should be possible to verify?

NiroZ
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Tahnan wrote:
So, to be clear:

* These shouldn't just be things that are maybe true, maybe false, about ourselves (e.g. this post)?

You can if you want too, but does it make an interesting statement?

* The statements should be possible to verify?

Yes

Tahnan
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NiroZ wrote:

Tahnan wrote:
So, to be clear:

* These shouldn't just be things that are maybe true, maybe false, about ourselves (e.g. this post)?

You can if you want too, but does it make an interesting statement?

I don't know. I thought the statements in my livejournal post were mildly interesting. But of course they can't really be verified by anyone other than me. (You could call my mom, I guess.)

Znirk
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Tahnan wrote:
(You could call my mom, I guess.)

Yay. Let's all do that.

Banjooie
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I may or may not have done this incorrectly. I'm not entirely sure.

Tahnan
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NiroZ wrote:
...potential voters can grill entrants.

This is an interesting contest, but I think this part of it doesn't work as well as NiroZ might have hoped. With over 25 entries at this point, it's just too much work to grill people on each one.

NiroZ
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Tahnan wrote:

NiroZ wrote:
...potential voters can grill entrants.

This is an interesting contest, but I think this part of it doesn't work as well as NiroZ might have hoped. With over 25 entries at this point, it's just too much work to grill people on each one.

29 actually. Bear in mind that if you think that an entry is too vague or requires rather specific knowledge (like what someone ate for breakfast), you don't have to grill the entrant.

Anyway, for the remaining week, what I've decided to do is run a unofficial poll to gather peoples opinions on the truth of the entires. It should make it interesting enough.

Tahnan
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I'm continuing to have mixed feelings about how this contest has gone. So I'm posting post-poll ponderings here, rather than in the poll threads (since there are two of them, and that just confuses me).

One of the most problematic criteria, for me, was "The voter's level of interest in whether the statement is true or false". A lot of people posted personal facts about themselves--when they downloaded the TCB demo, where they went to high school, etc.--and while some of them were mildly interesting to know, my reaction to most of them was "Eh, so?"

Of course, the flip side was that when people posted more general facts--bears invading Canada, one-atom-thick sheets--they seemed so easy to verify with an idle Google search that it was hard to have too much interest in those, either. Again, there were some that I found fairly interesting; I gave Banjooie a good score for posting something true that seemed quite unlikely, and the wanderlust-gene was a nice bluff. But such things were more exception than rule.

So admittedly, for my own, I went with something personal; but I did my best to make it something that people might find interesting by making it about eytanz as well as myself. I don't know how well I succeeded--as of the time of this writing, most of my votes are 6 or higher, and someone other than myself gave me a 10, but then I've also got a 2 and a 3, so clearly at least a few people weren't remotely interested in knowing.

As to how I voted--there's not much of a pattern, really; facts that seemed cool or well-bluffed got higher marks. I wasn't too impressed with Tokyokid's faked tale of injury, but I did like his true tale of principalhood, as many of us seemed pretty skeptical of it. Some of the external-fact-based ones were pretty enh: I mean, of course the Constitution doesn't have secret text on the back.

My least favorite ones, though, were the ones based on technicalities. The .0006 difference for entry #2 just kind of irritated me. "My statement is obviously true, despite the fact that I have no evidence to back it up" was irritating enough to warrant a "1". The fact that the first three sentences of #20 were true while the last one was false, plus the fact that "some microbes produce gold as a waste product" is true whereas "gold is just bug poo" is false (since it's not just bug poo), rubbed me the wrong way.

If someone were to run a contest like this one again--and I think it's interesting enough that a variation could be done, say, next April--I might suggest a few changes, such as:

(a) Have people use only externally-verifiable facts or only personal facts. The strange mix of them, as I noted, made it sort of hard to evaluate one against the other.

(b) Have each person post two "facts", one true and one false. (Or three, either requiring two false and one true, or requiring two true and one false.) I feel like that would provide people with a little more room to maneuver--for instance, as I said above, neither Tokyokid's story about his injuries or his principal-day were inherently that interesting to me (sorry, TK!), but if both were presented as "one is true, one is false", I would have considered them more thoughtfully.

OK, that's far more than merely two cents, and hopefully it's not so long as to bore people to sleep before they finish reading it. But, well, that's me for you--opinionated and long-winded. (It's useful in my profession.)

noma
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I'd like to thank NiroZ for running this contest (thank you NiroZ)and congratulate Tahnan (congratulations Tahnan.) It hasn't been officially announced but it looks like he's won.

I'd like to second Tahnan's idea of holding a similar contest again(especially as I'm very unlikely to ever enter an architecture contest .) However, running an "externally-verifiable" version could raise too many problems. Not every source out there is equal, and if a statement is pulled from a reliable source, it would probably be too easy for voters to verify it. But a "personal bluff" contest could be interesting. Everyone submits three statements -- say two false and one true -- and we vote on which we believe are true and which false. Whoever fools the most voters wins. It would be more straightforward and only require one poll: less work for NiroZ, which I imagine is a good thing.

As to the rest of Tahnan's points: I agree with many. For instance, Shortest Month is true, but only in places which had DST and then changed it. And I have yet to verify the Speed of Light entry. I've only come across one article and it's from seven years ago. I would think if this was really true the experiment would have been repeated and much publicized. (If anyone can verify this, I'd be very interested in reading more about it.) But in the end it doesn't really matter: it's just a contest and we all got to exercise our creative faculties.

Again, thanks NiroZ for organizing all this.

NiroZ
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Tahnan wrote:
One of the most problematic criteria, for me, was "The voter's level of interest in whether the statement is true or false". A lot of people posted personal facts about themselves--when they downloaded the TCB demo, where they went to high school, etc.--and while some of them were mildly interesting to know, my reaction to most of them was "Eh, so?"

I actually toyed with the idea of banning personal statements, but decided against it because, as you proved, there was the possibility of making an interesting one.

Of course, the flip side was that when people posted more general facts--bears invading Canada, one-atom-thick sheets--they seemed so easy to verify with an idle Google search that it was hard to have too much interest in those, either.

Heh, I did warn you guys.

If someone were to run a contest like this one again--and I think it's interesting enough that a variation could be done, say, next April--I might suggest a few changes, such as:

(a) Have people use only externally-verifiable facts or only personal facts. The strange mix of them, as I noted, made it sort of hard to evaluate one against the other.

(b) Have each person post two "facts", one true and one false. (Or three, either requiring two false and one true, or requiring two true and one false.) I feel like that would provide people with a little more room to maneuver--for instance, as I said above, neither Tokyokid's story about his injuries or his principal-day were inherently that interesting to me (sorry, TK!), but if both were presented as "one is true, one is false", I would have considered them more thoughtfully.

OK, that's far more than merely two cents, and hopefully it's not so long as to bore people to sleep before they finish reading it. But, well, that's me for you--opinionated and long-winded. (It's useful in my profession.)

You know, you ought to think about running a contest yourself. You can definitely write better than me .

Out of the variations you've presented however, I'd go for 3 facts, 1 false, one true, and one either way. I agree with noma that trying to have them externally verifiable is difficult, and it's not something that people just up and down at with joy when they have to do it to enter a competition.

noma wrote:Whoever fools the most voters wins. It would be more straightforward and only require one poll: less work for NiroZ, which I imagine is a good thing.

I dunno, I enjoyed wondering if the entry's were true or not, and I didn't mind the extra work that it involved.

---

[Last edited by NiroZ at 05-02-2007 08:36 AM]

NiroZ
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Ok, I apologise for dragging on a bit, but finally it seems that we have decided upon the winners, which are

1st Place: Tahnan, with his entry of 'Tahnan vs. Eytanz'

2nd Place: Noma, with her entry of 'Will you wander? Wonder no more.'

and 3rd Place: Znirk, with his entry of 'Tastiest Part of the Rabbit'

And to the rest of you for being daring enough to participate

NiroZ
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And I almost forgot. Can an admin please clean up the stickies, and sticky next months contest? Thanks

Znirk
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NiroZ wrote:
and 3rd Place: Znirk, with his entry of 'Tastiest Part of the Rabbit'

Whee! And the best part is, I got to eat chocolate ... FOR SCIENCE!