Pick an easter egg for chat.serverfault!

Question

On chat.meta.stackoverflow, there's a little easter egg where text entered as

[status-blah]

will be rendered as a moderator only tag.

We'd like to do something similar, but specific to serverfault -- namely, when you type a magic string, something amusing and in-joke-y for serverfault.com happens, and it's visible to the entire chat room.

Do you have any ideas for anything server-fault-y we can do as an easter egg in chat.serverfault.com ?

Answer here, or in the dedicated chat room for this topic at http://chat.serverfault.com/rooms/31/pick-a-meme

Answer 1

I was just reading through the chat transcript for the room, and I quite like the idea of

rm -rf /

doing something that appears to do something nasty, but perhaps to the end-user's session only? Perhaps pretend to purge the chat history and then crash Server Fault (perhaps bring up a BSOD (or a panic/halt if you don't want to mix operating system faults)).

Answer 2

How about a favico-style icon in front of certain links? Say, Windows icon for Microsoft links, that kind of thing. Kind of like this:

Thingy http://sysadmin1138.net/images/mickysoft.png

Oo! I know! Some kind of animated lightbulb whenever anyone has "any [thoughts|ideas]?" in a message. We get that a lot.

Answer 3

@gWaldo's answer made me think... I like the blinkenlights and the rm -rf /, but, those are just two specific examples. As a frequent user of chat.meta.stackoverflow.com what I like best about the [status-*] easter egg is that you can use it for anything. Leading to very funny back-and-forths. blinkenlights would probably be just a single image, or maybe a small handful.

In the spirit of the easter egg taking arbitrary user input and doing something to it, how about using either figlet or cowsay or something?

Examples:

serverfault-answer:Reboot Your Server! produces:

  ____      _                 _    __   __               
 |  _ \ ___| |__   ___   ___ | |_  \ \ / /__  _   _ _ __ 
 | |_) / _ \ '_ \ / _ \ / _ \| __|  \ V / _ \| | | | '__|
 |  _ <  __/ |_) | (_) | (_) | |_    | | (_) | |_| | |   
 |_| \_\___|_.__/ \___/ \___/ \__|   |_|\___/ \__,_|_|   

  ____                           _ 
 / ___|  ___ _ ____   _____ _ __| |
 \___ \ / _ \ '__\ \ / / _ \ '__| |
  ___) |  __/ |   \ V /  __/ |  |_|
 |____/ \___|_|    \_/ \___|_|  (_)

Or:

 _____________________
< Reboot Your Server! >
 ---------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Answer 4

I was thinking something with blinkenlights..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights

Like some kind of light (image) with an optional text such as

blinkenlights server overloaded

would produce something like..

.. (but more small single line icon-y) with the text "server overload" next to it

(from http://www.blinkenlights.nl/)

Answer 5

How about supporting changing the way usernames/gravatars/rep etc are displayed by typing something like PS1=<something>. also when you do this regular users have a '$' appended to their user name, and mods have '#' appended.

Answer 6

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Answer 7

How about involving the term

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

.. for random questions? Not sure how it would work, but that quote solves about 90% of the questions right? :-)