One Million Checkboxes players hid binary codes, QR codes and rickrolls among the boxes during their two-week war

Back in June, Edwin introduced One Million Checkboxes, a website with a million checkboxes that players could check or uncheck, with any changes visible to everyone else on the site. It became an obsession for some during the two weeks the website was live, as players raced to fill in all the boxes or undo their peers’ work.

The fight was a lot more complicated than it seemed, as the developer recently explained, with some players finding ways to encode hidden messages into the checkboxes.

“Half a million people visited the site in the days after it launched. People checked 650,000,000 boxes in the two weeks I kept the site up,” Nolen Royalty wrote in a recent Twitter thread.

With so many players, Nolen was concerned that people would use the checkboxes to write offensive messages in such a large public space. His solution was to make the rows of checkboxes adapt to the size of your browser, meaning that messages written via checkboxes would only line up 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 it worked well; we didn’t get bogged down in crude graffiti and because the constraint was subtle, most people didn’t even notice it,” he writes.

This was not the only way to create messages in check boxes, however. Each check box was actually a bit, the most basic unit of information in computing. A bit is either a 0 or a 1, just as a check box is unchecked or checked.

At one point, Nolen rewrote the backend to keep the site online while many players were using it simultaneously, and he decided to “put the database in ASCII.” ASCII is actually the code that stores text in computers. “I have no idea why I did that. I just did it.”

What one would normally expect to see in this situation is complete gibberish, as the checkboxes are converted into random strings of letters and numbers. Instead, Nolen found messages — specifically website URLs.

“There was a URL in my database that had ‘catgirls’ in it and I panicked. I thought I had been hacked! I started digging through my code, through my logs, trying to find the problem.”

The site hadn’t been hacked, though. Instead, while some players were fighting over checking and unchecking boxes, others were using those boxes to write messages in binary. Apparently, they had written a bot to recreate those messages if someone checked or unchecked a vital box. The URL? It pointed to a Discord called “Checking Boxes,” where a small number of players had gathered. Players were understandably excited when the game’s creator suddenly appeared on their server.

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

So there’s a lot going on here! In addition to the drawings, we have a few secrets. There’s the binary message I found, but above it is a base64 version of the same message. And we also have a QR code (with full error correction) that links to the discord. pic.twitter.com/DWXhY4yRQq

— nolen (@itseieio) August 29, 2024

“The Discord was full of really smart teenagers, and they were secretly writing this message to bring other really smart teenagers together,” Nolen wrote. “And it worked perfectly! There were 15 people on the Discord when I joined, but over 60 by the time I shut it down. (The Discord is now hidden.)”

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

“It was awesome. It was so cool. And I found it so moving,” Nolen writes. “I spent my childhood doing stupid stuff on the computer. People didn’t usually pick on me when, for example, I repeatedly broke my school’s email server.”

“I would never do what I do today without that encouragement.

“Being able to provide encouragement myself, to provide a playground like this, to see what people were doing and tell them how much I loved it, was a deeply meaningful experience for me.”

“A lot of people were crazy about the bots on OMCB. I totally get that. Bots can be frustrating. But the people on that Discord were so creative, so talented, so cool! Today’s troublemakers will create tomorrow’s games,” he concluded. “I can’t wait to see what this Discord will bring.”

I’m a big fan of Nolen’s work, which includes the gaze game we’ve already talked about, because it evokes an older, more experimental, and playful version of the Internet. His site’s tagline is “The Internet can still be fun!” and the players getting into mischief and silliness are part of that same spirit. Kudos to all.