My point was that the moderatorship and populace of the XKCD forums were willing to tolerate a disruption in the forum discussions, whereas HLP's membership and some of the admins reacted strongly against it. (To play my own devil's advocate, rearranging the sentences in a post, which in some cases also affected the bbcode, is a lot more disruptive than just replacing phrases.)
I'm sure the 12th time that happened they would appreciate it less though. What you simply don't seem to get is that the joke is OLD. It's no longer funny. You'll notice that very few people who have actually been on HLP for long are the ones who like the joke. Those of us who have been here a while have seen it past the point it was funny.
And unlike XKCD this is not a matter of not being able to talk about Freespace. People sick of the forum modifications don't visit HLP and don't work on their projects as a result. The motto of HLP is supposed to be Bringing Modders Together, not Driving Modders Away Cause of Stupid Bull****.
As far as the execution goes, what often happens is that either April Fools isn't discussed, or it's discussed but nobody can think of a good idea, or someone thinks of a good idea but can't implement it in time. Then April Fools rolls around and I think that at least something should be done, so I whip up some sort of forum manipulation in the PHP code.
So if that happens then we don't do anything that year. Cause if April Fools is of so little importance that it can't be discussed a week ahead of time, it's not important at all. There's always someone who plans something. Quite often the stupid forum hacks only have the effect of ruining a much funnier joke. The whole wxLauncher gag for instance would have been completely ruined by the hack you added.
