What Easter eggs do the chat sites have?

Question

According to balpha, the SE chat sites may have individual Easter eggs, depending on the site. If you find them, please post.

Because it's so easy to make this stuff up, a screenshot as proof would be nice. (Although Photoshop isn't that hard either...)

Answer 1

All chat domains, all rooms: this is fine

Typing the message this is fine as-is results in server side rendering of the message into this:

This isn't case sensitive, however formatted messages won't be parsed as a picture.

Meta Stack Exchange/(any room): red tags

Send a message consisting solely of [status-SOME_PLAINTEXT_STRING] and it will appear in chat like a moderator tag. Doing this as a reply to another message is okay, but other text or formatting will not work. The plaintext string cannot be longer than 50 characters, and must match the regex [-A-Za-z0-9_]+.

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Gaming/The Bridge: minigame Eggs.Asteroids

Send the message insert coin and click on the floating "click me" button that appears to start an Asteroids-esque minigame with user avatars.

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Super User/Root Access: helpful assistant Eggs.Assistant

Send a message matching the regex /(?:^|[.!?:]\s+)(?:(?:how\s+(?:can|do)\s+i)\s+([^?!.:]+)\?|(?:i(?:\s+want|(?:\s‌​+am|'m)\s+(?:wanting|trying)|'d\s+like|\s+would\s+like)\s+to\s+([^?!.:]+)(?:$|\.|‌​!)))/i to start an animation of a "helpful" anthropomorphic paperclip. Some other "how" questions will also work. (Yes, it's kinda crazy, but that's what balpha says the official regex is.)

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Server Fault/The Comms Room: system crash Eggs.Console

Send the message rm -rf / to blank your screen out for a few seconds.

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Stack Overflow/(any room): insanity Eggs.Cthulu

Send the message <(?:"[^"]*"['"]*|'[^']*'['"]*|[^'">])+> to make quotes from this famous answer float all over your screen. Some other regular expressions will also work; the system looks at each attempt and makes a guess about whether it's an attempt to parse HTML or not.

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RPG Stackexchange: dice roller

Send a message with d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 or d20 to have chat roll a die matching your input. This can be preceded with a number from 1-9. Chat will return a set of die rolls matching the dice expression used. You can also mix the expressions to get die of multiple types in a roll.

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Travel Stack Exchange/(any room)

The world map preview on the bottom bar to the right of the message entry box zooms in and out based on how far the page is scrolled: scrolling up will zoom out, and scrolling down will zoom it in. The center point of this zoom changes based on your location.

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Other SE sites/(any room): search

Searching for "easter", "egg", "eggs", "easter egg" or "easter eggs" results in a number of fake messages instead of actually searching for those terms. The results change each time the search is run. This works on all the chat sites

Answer 2

Because this came up earlier in the Python chatroom: The chat script is made so all Easter eggs, except the activated one, are removed at run-time, making them inaccessible. On Stack Overflow, the activated easter egg is Cthulu.

You can activate Cthulu by entering a regex that matches a HTML tag. The simplest way to do that is by typing <[^>] into chat.

To get the other eggs work again, we need to hack a bit. For that, we will use the JavaScript consoles, browsers ship with. To access those, do the following:

• Chrome: Ctrl + Shift + J
• Firefox: Ctrl + Shift + K
• Other browsers: F12 and then choose the console (Ctrl + 2)

As mentioned above, the other Easter eggs are removed at run-time when the chat loads. So to get them back, we first need to reload them. To do that, enter the following command into the console:

$.getScript('http://cdn-chat.sstatic.net/chat/Js/eggs.js');

After that, we can access all Easter eggs using Eggs. To change the currently activated easter egg, we can set Eggs.Current, for example to enable Asteroids, type Eggs.Current = Eggs.Asterioids.

But we can also just trigger the Easter eggs directly—without having to spam the chat room ;) The following list shows what to enter to trigger each Easter egg:

• Asteroids: Eggs.Asteroids('insert coin')
• Assistant: Eggs.Assistant('I would like to start the assistant')
• Cthulu: Eggs.Cthulu('<[^>]')
• Console: Eggs.Console('rm -r') or Eggs.Console('del /s')

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Finally, there is the “WOB”, or “Wheel of Blame”. This one is a lot harder to activate because it does not seem to be integrated—possibly because it isn’t activated and as such maintained anymore. It’s still nice to see, so I want to give you the possibility to look at it anyway. Of course, this is not how it regularly works; it seems that it usually would be triggered by some new messages, but I couldn’t really figure out what the trigger exactly is. So my interpretion might be wrong, but it still works to see the Easter egg’s effect:

First, we initialize the easter egg using Eggs.WOB.init(). Next, we manully mark the last message as “new or edit”—this is something the WOB egg requires, probably because it would usually trigger on new messages:

var msg = $('.message').last().addClass('neworedit');

And finally, we can start the WOB.blame with appropriate parameters. The first parameter is the user id of the author of that message, and the second parameter is the message itself:

Eggs.WOB.blame(msg.parent().parent().attr('class').match(/user-(\d+)/)[1], msg);

Answer 3

Here is one I found on Super User Root Access:

I typed this in the chat box:

I need to find a camera for a conference table. The table sits about 14 people. I would like to mount the camera permanently on the wall, so I am thinking a range of clarity for about 20 feet. It will be for video conferencing.

Here are a few more, but I don't remember what I was saying. I took the screenshots when it happened though - these are real, and from the same chat room.

Answer 4

Here's another one from Super User Root Access.