14 DAY TRIAL // The first day of April, also known under the name of April Fools, is a time when fake and crazy news stories are published as being true, only to be revealed as false by the end of the day; but there is one problem. It's possible that some items are crazy, but true, and people might have a hard time believing them.
Softpedia didn't publish any fake story yesterday. It wasn't because we didn't want to, but some of the real stuff that we did publish was crazy enough so people might have had a hard time believing it. It was actually a lot of fun to see people trying to find out whether a particular piece of news was fake, when in fact it was true. And to top it all off, yesterday was actually a normal news day.
Even normal news, that would seem reasonable in any other day than April Fools, gets distorted and filtered through a lens of doubt. The first piece we wanted to mention was “Valve Is Helping Developers Port Games to Linux, Star Conflict to Be Launched Soon”.
It looks normal now, but yesterday we needed to reassure people that this was actually true. Users started posting messages from the developer of Star Conflict to convince other people.
The second item on our “crazy” news list was “elementary OS Gets a Development Version, Download Now”. Simple enough title, you wouldn't give it another thought. Now, the ISO images for the new development version of elementary OS were published on March 31, which wasn't technically April Fools.
This didn't stop users to ask obsessively whether this was just another poor attempt at humor, and some users didn't even believe it when we showed them the download links. We didn't even say that was the upcoming “Isis,” but it still caused quite a ruckus.
The third piece of news we only just published today because we fell into the same trap as our readers. It seemed like a joke and we were quite sure that it's fake. The article is now called “SMPlayer Version Jumps from 0.8.6 to 14.3.0, Gets Major Improvements”, but yesterday we thought that there was no way a version could switch from 0.8.6 to 14.3.0. We were wrong.
April Fools news can be usually recognized as fake as soon as you see it, but sometimes it's hard to make a difference. If you encountered hard-to-believe-but-true articles, be sure to share them with the rest us in the comments section below.