To which I will add, those pranks will be indexed and available through Google throughout those other 364 days.

I think it should be mandatory for April Fools pranksters to alter their robots.txt file to keep search engines from indexing this junk. You can always change it back on April 2 after wiping the prank contents.

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"To which I will add, those pranks will be indexed and available through Google throughout those other 364 days. "

In the case of Mac OS X Hints, that amounts to exactly six posts. One announced "WinXP Hints," one covered a fake G5 product, another a fake 30th Anniversary Mac, one an all-black Hints theme, and this year's OS 9 hints. That leaves exactly one post that *might* be confused with a real hint, the one about installing OS X on the iPod. However, there are now a bunch of comments on that hint indicating it's a joke, so nobody is likely to be confused.

I'm OK with Google indexing these six pages; I don't think it will lead to consumer confusion, nor finding incorrect hints when searching for something else.

But I do agree that inappropriate prank content shouldn't be indexed, which is why I deleted all 10 of the fake hints, and left only the downloadable image collection here as evidence of the prank's existence.

-rob.

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Well Rob, your content was more benign than most of the stupid pranks I've seen, everything you posted was true (and only funny in this context) so I'm not singling you out specifically.
One particular prank comes to mind, several years ago, a Mac website posted an Apr 1 story about Steve Jobs selling all his Apple stock and included some extremely damaging comments (if you didn't know it was a joke). Alas, that story had extremely high Google ranking if you searched for "Steve Jobs" and remained a top search result for months. I asked the site operator to edit that story on Apr 2 to include a disclaimer that it was a joke, but he wouldn't do it.
IMHO it is not funny to make a joke that could damage our favorite computer company. I'm not accusing you of that, but some people are pretty stupid and WILL make a joke at someone else's expense.

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