Oh boy, did this one nearly cause a riot. The first of April 1999 was around the peak of the "Melissa Virus" scare. I was so sick of hearing about it, seeing news stories on TV, getting 1 zillion email messages warning me against the virus, etc. In fact, I think more email traffic was generated by people warning each other than by the virus itself. It was in that environment of near panic that I dropped our April Fool's bomb.

In partnership with Amy Ayers, I changed the home page to include a fake pop-up warning box alerting users that their computers have contracted the dreaded "Drucilla Monitor Virus". We provided a couple of pages of outrageous warning/advice about dealing with the virus along with an anti-virus inoculation link. "Installing" the anti-virus, along with setting a cookie that disabled the pop-up warning, let the user in on the joke.

I *thought* everyone would easily know that that it was a joke. I mean, people should at least know that their monitor can't catch a computer virus, nor can you spread a computer virus from machine to machine by failing to wash your hands after contact with an infected machine. Apparently I underestimated the naivité of a lot of the general public.

Apparently, many people believed the warning. Computing support people from all over campus called for me to be fired because their users were freaking out when they saw the warning message. I attempted to argue that if their users actually believed it, then they need some serious computer education.

The feedback seemed about 50-50. We got lots of praise and lots of hate mail. Lovely. Even a local news program came and "interviewed" me about it. I have the segment in RealVideo format somewhere; I'll try and dig it up soon...

Anyway, you can click the thumbnail above to see an arvhived version of the page; it may or may not set a cookie, but don't worry, the archive version doesn't check for one anyway. You'll be able to see the joke over and over if you like.