Way back in 1994, we came up with this idea. This was in the time before major search engines, when the Web was still young and frisky and mostly free of banner ads. Or something. The actual implementation and administration of the Egg Server was all done by Zarf, and this is his wrap-up commentary.
Note that since this took place so long ago, the eggs are mostly gone; even though we have a list of links to them don't be suprised when they are now broken!
Note that Karen actually has one egg on her home page. Each Egg host only knew where his/her own Egg was; we figured that having a head start of one was fair payment for agreeing to support us in our crazy scheme.
We bet you're wondering just where all those pesky eggs were, and how many people entered the competition. Accesses to the Egg server started out at nearly 100 per hour, and levelled off at about 80 per hour for most of the contest period. Wow! (That includes accesses to the rules page, which accounted for about 20 accesses per hour for most of the contest.)
Quite a number of people tried requesting wildcards or somethign like index.html from the server. Naturally, it didn't work. The server was not a standard httpd; it was a hand-coded hack. (This also, unfortunately, explains why the server died or froze occasionally during the contest. It didn't help that I was moved to a different office on Nov. 14, and they didn't get the network cable in place until the next day.)
There were two fake or pseudo-Eggs that we noticed. One was on the Spider Home Page, and explicitly said it was not a real Egg, so we didn't mind. The other was on the Rolling Stones page (big time media players are so unoriginal); that one was just a pointer to the Egg server with an invalid key. We got kind of annoyed at that, since there was no way for players to tell that it wasn't our fault, but by the time we found where it was coming from it had already been removed. (We strongly considered taking off mondo points for anyone who submitted a fake egg in their entry. We decided against it -- but, gee, folks, pay a little attention next time. Sigh.)
Overall, everyone seemed to have fun. Yes, we'll do it again... when we've recovered from this round. We have some evil ideas on making it more interesting!
No, really, we will run another one some day!
Thanks to everyone who played; double thanks to everyone who hosted an Egg; triple thanks to the people who invented the Web and the clients and the Internet and computers and the wheel.
Let's close with a list of compliments we've received about the Egg Hunt. These are all real and unsolicited, honest...