One Million Checkboxes players hid binary, QR codes and rickrolls among the boxes during its two week war
Back in June, Edwin covered One Million Checkboxes, a website with one million checkboxes that players could check or uncheck, with any change visible to all other visitors of the site. It became an obsession for some in the two weeks the website was online, as players fought to fill all the boxes, or undo the work of their peers.
The fight was far more complicated than it seemed, as the developer recently explained, with some players finding ways to encode hidden messages in the checkboxes.
"Half a million people visited the site within days of launch. Folks checked 650,000,000 boxes in the 2 weeks I kept the site online," wrote Nolen Royalty in a recent Twitter thread.
With so many people playing, Nolen was concerned that people would use the checkboxes to spell out offensive messages on such a vast public canvas. His solution was to make the rows of checkboxes scale to the size of your browser, meaning messages spelled out via checked boxes would only align and be readable at certain widths.
"This meant that if you drew something on your phone it wouldn't show up for me on my laptop and vice-versa. I think this worked well; we didn't get bogged down in gross graffiti and since the constraint was subtle most people didn't even notice," he writes.
This wasn't the only way to create messages in the checkboxes, however. Each checkbox was effectively a bit - the most basic unit of information in computing. A bit is either a 0 or a 1, much like a checkbox is unchecked or checked.
At some point, Nolen re-wrote the backend to keep the website online while so many players were using it simultaneously, and he decided "dump the database in ASCII." ASCII is basically the code that stores text in computers. "I have no idea why I did this. I just did it."
What you'd normally expect to see in this situation is total gibberish, as the checkboxes are converted to random strings of letters and numbers. Instead Nolen found messages - specifically website URLs.
"A URL with
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