How to Create Customized Popup Jokes to Prank Your Friends
Have you ever seen this message on your PC?
I’ll put it this way, you’ll only see that message if I’ve had a little time to sabotage your PC while you had your back turned. Believe me, I love PC pranks and jokes. I’ve been doing them for years – just ask my friends at work. Read on and I’ll tell you how to create one of the easiest, but most flexible pranks.
The VB Script Prank
First, open up your Windows Notepad or your favorite plain text editor. Now paste in the following text.
MsgBox “Windows has determined that you may not be smart enough to surf the internet. Click OK if you are stupid!”, 0, “Error”
Now save the file as joke.vbs
Finally, double click the file to test it. You should see the same message box I displayed above.
How does it work?
The VBS in joke.vbs, stands for Visual Basic Script. As far as I know, every copy of Windows can interpret Microsoft Visual Basic scripts. Visual Basic scripting is a powerful programming language that can work miracles or destroy your hard work. In this prank, all it does is pop up a harmless message window. VBS by itself isn’t evil. It depends on who the programmer is. So when you use it, be very very careful.
Can you change the message?
Yes, it’s easy to tweak this prank. Here’s a template you can use.
MsgBox “***YourMessage***”, 0, “***MessageBoxTitle***”
You can replace the text ***YourMessage*** with your message. If you want to change the title that displays in the window’s title bar, you can change the text ***MessageBoxTitle***.
Be sure that you keep the quotes.
How can you make people click on it?
Let’s say someone you know uses a shortcut on their desktop to run Internet Explorer. We’ll replace their shortcut with our own prank short cut.
1. Move their shortcut and your joke.vbs file to somewhere in a folder on the PC.
2. On the desktop, create a shortcut to your joke.vbs file.
3. Right click on the joke.vbs shortcut, select Properties, and choose the “Change Icon” button.
4. Now select the icon which looks like Internet Explorer.
5. Change the name of the shortcut to Internet Explorer.
6. Get ready to laugh at them when they try to go surfing.
If you’d like to learn more about the VB MsgBox function, you can read about it at vbtutor.
Do you have any questions about jokes, pranks or programming? Do you have any ideas you’d like to share? Be sure to add a comment below or email me. I’d love to hear from you.
Author: Clif Sipe
Promoting Freeware and Free information since 2004. Owner of FreewareWiki.com with over 2000 pages of freebies. Please subscribe to my Google Feed or follow me on Twitter @clifnotes.Clif Sipe has written 374 articles for us.
The author of this post can be contacted at clif@techie-buzz.comComment Using Facebook
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oh gosh. it’s cool! thanks for this! =p
Thanks for the comment. Have fun but don’t make them mad at you.
Woo-hoo. Time to pull a fast one on my friends. Love it. Well done. :)
I might try this on my boss today, for all the good and bad reasons make him suffer – evil ehhhh :)
I bet it would be fun to prank the boss. You’ll have to think of a good line to put in the message. Let us know how it goes.
I like the msgbox prank!!!!
how do I create a VBS code in Microsoft Office 2007 where a msgbox will pop up everytime the spacbar is pressed?
I know where to place the script/code, just not sure how to write one…
thnx
Hi JJ – thanks for asking. I am not familiar enough with VB script to be able to help you with this request. I recommend that you sign up for DonationCoder (free) and make a request in the Coding Snacks forum. The programmers at DC will definitely help. You won’t find a nicer bunch of geeks.
Coding Snacks – DonationCoder.com http://bit.ly/bEcRhu
Even better:
Do
MsgBox “Windows has determined that you may not be smart enough to surf the internet. Click OK if you are stupid!â€, 0, “Errorâ€
MsgBox “Yes, I know. You are so stupid.â€, 0, “LOLâ€
Loop
With this, the message will show up FOREVER (until you restart the computer or finish “wscript.exe” process.
That’s a good tip. Thanks
I love doing this, so I decided to find out what would happen if I changed the 0 in the middle. I found out for every different number you put in, you get a different message box! I researched this further and ended up making an entire list of them.
0 (or Blank)=Ok
1=Ok Cancel
2=Abort Retry Ignore
3=Yes No Cancel
4=Yes No
5=Retry Cancel
6-15=Ok (Same as 0)
16=X Ok
17=X Ok Cancel
18=X Abort Retry Ignore
19=X Yes No Cancel
20=X Yes No
21=X Retry Cancel
22-31=Ok (Same as 0 and 6)
32=? Ok
33=? Ok Cancel
34=? Abort Retry Ignore
35=? Yes No Cancel
36=? Yes No
37=? Retry Cancel
38-47=Ok (Same as 0,6,and 22)
48=! Ok
49=! Ok Cancel
50=! Abort Retry Ignore
51=! Yes No
52=! Yes No Cancel
53=! Retry Cancel
54-63=Ok (Same as all the others)
64=i Ok
65=i Ok Cancel
66=i Abort Retry Ignore
67=i Yes No
68=i Yes No Cancel
69=i Retry Cancel
Yay Me!