Hmm. This may be how legends are formed.
Let's distinguish between an0n the person and an0n the account. The admins used an0n's account as a sock puppet during April Fool's day, but at no time was an0n, the person, ever in control of HLP. Nor did an0n, the person, have control of his account at any point during the day, although he added to the confusion by claiming on IRC that he really
was taking over the boards.
The sequence of events was this:
1) The putative "April Fool's prank" was changing the forum to use the pirate filter.
2) Next, we pretended that an0n took advantage of the theme change to take over the forums. This was the
real April Fool's prank.
3) I caused the majority of the mayhem, including the deleting-all-the-boards incident.
4) Despite backing up the forums beforehand, we found that Gamespy's database restore was unavailable, and it remained unavailable for about a month. During this month, the forums appeared as they did at the end of April Fool's Day.
#4 was the only part of it not planned. The plan had been to restore the forums at the end of the day as if nothing had ever happened.