While many students use Ion every day to sign up for 8th periods, to stay up-to-date on upcoming events, or even to check the status of their bus, not every student knows of the secret easter eggs the sysadmins leave scattered across the Intranet. 

“There are several fun phrases that you can put into the search bar in order to reveal some fun behaviors. I encourage anyone who’s interested to hunt for those,” lead sysadmin Lauren Delwiche said.

These easter eggs come in many forms such as loud music played at the click of a button on the login page, or little messages popping up while searching for a bus. The senior destination page shows seniors with obscure majors going to relatively unknown universities. According to this easter egg destination page, 16 members of the class of 2022 are studying bowling management. These are just some of the easter eggs that the sysadmins have left across Ion.

 Creation of the easter eggs are not limited to just the sysadmins. Anyone with a humorous idea and a knowledge of JavaScript can create one.

“There isn’t a particular process to coming up with ideas – Ion is open source, so anyone who has an idea can add something,” Delwiche said.

These easter eggs have existed within Ion since its creation and have passed down through the sysadmins over the years, with more and more easter eggs bring added every generation. 

“Easter eggs are just little pieces of humor that we like to leave behind knowing that both us the developers and our users will get a laugh out of them,” Delwiche said.