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 ‘catgirls’ in it was sitting there in my database and I PANICKED. I thought I’d been hacked! I started searching through my code, searching through my logs, trying to find the problem.”

The website hadn’t been hacked, however. Instead, while some players were battling one another to check and uncheck boxes, some others were using the checkboxes to spell out messages in binary. Seemingly they’d written a bot to recreate these message should anyone come along and check or uncheck a vital box. The URL? It pointed to a Discord called “Checking Boxes”, where a small number of players had gathered. The players are understandably excited when suddenly the game’s creator showed up in their server.

One of the Discord members then asks Nolen if he’s looked at the game as a 1000×1000 image yet. When he did, it looked like this:

“The Discord was full of very sharp teens, and they were writing this message in secret to gather other very sharp teens,” writes Nolen. “And it totally worked!! There were 15 people when I joined the discord but over 60 by the time I shut down the site. (the discord is now hidden)”

Over the course of the two weeks, these players used their bots to create a blue screen of death image that almost filled the entire play area, covered it in other memes and logos, and even managed to create an animated rickroll:

“It was sick. It was so cool. And I found this so moving,” writes Nolen. “I spent my childhood doing dumb stuff on the computer. People mostly didn’t get mad at me when I, for example, repeatedly broke my school mail server.

“There’s no way I’d be doing what I do now without that encouragement.

“So getting to provide some encouragement of my own – providing a playground like this and seeing what folks were doing and telling them how much I loved it – was so deeply meaningful to me.”

“Many people were mad about bots on OMCB. I totally get that. Bots can be frustrating. But the people in this discord were so creative, so talented, so cool! The mischief makers of today will make the games of tomorrow,” he concluded. “I can’t wait to see what this discord goes on to make”.

I’m a big fan of Nolen’s work, which includes the staring game we’ve written about previously, because it evokes an older, more experimental, more playful version of the internet. The tagline of his site is “The internet can still be fun!” and players doing dumb, mischievous stuff is part of that same spirit. Well done, everybody.