How a Simple Website Became One of My Favorite Story of all Time

Today I am going to talk about a website that I discovered in X (previously Twitter) 3 months ago. The website is called One Million Checkboxes and goal of it is to tick all one million boxes. The catch is that the other players can un-tick the boxes you have previously ticked. This might be a great game for someone like me with OCD (self-diagnosed 😅).

^{The current display of the said website which is no longer playable.}

The Gameplay

It was two months ago when the post was recommended to my "For You" page, and I was immediately hooked after visiting the website. When the page loaded, I instantly ticked all the boxes that I could check. This made me switched my focus to the game instead of doing my work. After playing for several minutes and having been checking all the boxes that I could marked, most of those now were gone! Those other players made sure that no boxes should be ticked. Annoyed by the team "un-checked boxes", I put down my phone and continued my work.

I continued playing the game for a few days. This time with a different strategy, I scrolled down to the 700,000th boxes. I saw that no other players were engaging so I started marking the boxes until I was satisfied. It was impossible for the team "check all boxes" because it attracted a lot of players that removes all the check marks in each box. Frustrated, I tried manipulating the website and managed to check some boxes, but it ruined the fun for me, so I stopped playing the game.

^{The gameplay.}

The Story

Several months have passed and one time I was doom-scrolling in X when I noticed that the creator of the said website said in a post that he thought he was hacked. I was intrigued and read his whole thread. Before I share to you the actual story, let me share a fact. Apparently, his website made it to global news and did some interviews with the New York Times and Washington Post. That is just the tip of the iceberg!

Now to the actual story and more technical stuffs, how he handles the data for 1 million checkboxes is that each box represents as a bit. Since there's a million, this would mean that there will be 1 million bits or 125 kilobytes. Pretty light, right? Now, the next thing he did was he accidentally converted the entire raw 125 kilobytes into ASCII encoding and he encountered some URL in it as shown below.

^{The hidden messages.}

Without explaining the conversion of the data, let's just assume that each 8 boxes represent 1 character. Now all 1 million bits are divided by 8 parts and each of them has certain characters. Also, since it was possible to cheat the website, some users were able to manipulate the state of each box in order to represent it a character they want. After the creator managed to decode the data, he visited the website.

Upon visiting the website, it was a Discord invitation. When he was accepted, he was surprised that mostly were teenagers were operating it. Not only they convert the raw data to ASCII but to other conversion as well. They made some drawings and even some animations! I was so moved at that time and kind of proud to be part of those moments. From a simple idea that led to international news. What an incredible story it is.

^{The hidden messages.}

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