GTAForums April Fool’s Joke (2nd April 2005)
This year it was a blatantly fake announcement about Premier Membership. This prank was so poorly thought out and the hints given in the opening post were so obvious (such as the use of the breadfish icon) that it was hardly worth bothering with, frankly. As with all previous pranks, the joke was created by the staff to make themselves feel cool and powerful rather than actually try and do something funny.
I suggested that a far better prank would have been for them to allow me onto the staff and create a new policy, then kick me off the staff at the start of May and restore the current policy. That would have been highly amusing for pretty much everyone at the forums and the staff could still have felt like they were cunning and dominant. Instead, we just had to put up with a day of confused kids panicking whilst the staff told them lies to make them panic even more.
When I pointed out the blatancy of the prank, Brodan got upset about me spoiling their little joke and banned me. I am unbanned now, so they obviously realised that because I figured out what was going on and was not afraid to post it, I would make it obvious to even the most gullible members that it was a fake. The joke really was on the staff this year, since even after banning there were loads of people just laughing at the staff in the thread saying about how obvious the whole thing was.