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Writing www.stackoverflow.com/admin.php in the search bar of a web browser takes you to a random 10 hour YouTube video. Same for any site in Stack Exchange network.

My question is, why did Stack Exchange do it? Is it an Easter egg? The developers are just being funny? Did they want to offer programmers a link to take users to funny YouTube videos?

More, there is an Android game called "Nothing". If you perform some slides and taps in it, it takes you to that link.

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I copy my answer from MSO verbatim here:

That is by design.

Nick Craver, one of the Site Reliability Engineers/Developer/Architecture Lead (Chief Maintenance Mode), tweeted about this a while a go: Just deployed Stack Overflow. Have fun, bots:

He basically added Redirect responses for the most common attempted pages often used by hackers and script kiddies. For the redirect target he decided to choose a video that keeps them occupied for a while ...

For search-ability matters here are the routes:

  • admin.php
  • admin/login.php
  • administrator/index.php
  • ajaxproxy/proxy.php
  • bitrix/admin/index.php
  • magmi/web/magmi.php
  • index.php
  • wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
  • wp-admin/post-new.php
  • wp-admin/options-link.php
  • wp-admin/includes/themes.php
  • wp-login.php
  • xmlrpc.php

Some users might argue about redirecting being a bad idea. My response to that is that the most important thing is to get them away from Stack Overflow as quickly as possible without consuming resources. Redirecting them to YouTube who can handle the load easy is the best option. I don't see why hackers should have a great (user) experience.

For easy reference here is the BotLovin.cs code (with awesome comments like: first link is unavailable for me, but second link is available with no interruption until 6:12:24 (please double check))

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