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An Easter Egg Nobody Found

Seven years ago, when i launched this website, I added a little easter egg to the newsletter subscription form: Whenever a user entered something that was not an email address, they got a chance to have a chat with Eliza.1,2

To the best of my knowledge3, no-one has found it yet.

A screenshot showing a newsletter subscription form that switches to an ELIZA chat if you enter any text that is not an email address.
The hidden feature (probably) nobody found.
A screenshot of a chat inout form that allows you to talk to ELIZA.
The subscription form switches to a chat (without history) completely. Even the submit button changes! Yet, no-one has seen this cool thing.

It's a bit of a shame. A bit like thinking of a good joke and then never being in the circumstances to tell it. And now it's 2025, and everyone can chat with bots that are much more sophisticated than ELIZA.

So what should I do with the code? In the spirit of clean code, removing unused functionality? Or keep it, as a silent nod to a different time?

  1. See Wikipedia Page for the initial, 1966, implementation.↩
  2. I used Norbert Landsteiner's javascript implementation available at https://www.masswerk.at/elizabot/.↩
  3. I send a custom event to my analytics package, and after filtering against my own IP-range, I find - nothing. Of course, people could opt out of tracking, but how likely is that?↩
Published 2025~05~26

Link Graph

Yeah, I know, the 2000s knocked and wanted to show you their ideas about knowledge navigation, but I really like those graphs, even if they are not the most practical instruments, plus I actually developed a network-based knowledge management system called 'Serendipity' back in the day, so please stop making fun of me.