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This question has accumulated 689 upvotes since yesterday, and the single answer has accumulated 708 upvotes. Now, there may be questions that merit such adulation, and this one is kind of interesting, but not that interesting.

What's going on?

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    OK -- Google tells me that dozens of web sites have been spammed with the link to that page.
    – Daniel R Hicks
    Commented Aug 7, 2014 at 2:52
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    A few of my co-workers and myself were in fits over this question yesterday. We couldn't talk we were laughing so hard. Doesn't surprise me that it has so many votes.
    – Qix - MONICA WAS MISTREATED
    Commented Aug 7, 2014 at 18:06
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    This is what happens when a question goes viral. We used to have the occasional question like this back in the early days of StackOverflow. At some point in the intervening years the humour police came along and removed most of the humour from the site. Thankfully this is a legitimate question, with a legitimate answer so it should survive without deletion.
    – Doctor Jones
    Commented Aug 11, 2014 at 15:16
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    Sad that humour doesn't seem to be allowed on this site anymore :( Anyway: Reputation increase is capped at +200/day, which that question and answer has far exceeded, so the person who spammed the link isn't doing either of them any favours. In fact, because people are being attracted to the question sooner, rather than later, both people will probably get less rep overall.
    – Zaz
    Commented Aug 12, 2014 at 17:55
  • What Qix said. Yeah, it is that interesting
    – mcalex
    Commented Aug 14, 2014 at 5:32
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    I saw it (I'm a regular on Seasoned Advice) when it was brand new and on the "Hot Network Questions" list. I laughed my butt off and took a screenshot and brought it to the cooking chatroom. I registered for this stack just so I could upvote it. Word of mouth (or keyboard) plus a funny title can be a perfect storm.
    – Jolenealaska
    Commented Aug 15, 2014 at 11:58
  • OK. It didn't seem all THAT funny to me, probably mostly because I figure it's simply a trick played by the previous owner of the unit. I'm guessing it's fairly easy to edit the registry to change the icon.
    – Daniel R Hicks
    Commented Aug 15, 2014 at 12:20
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    I also saw a repost of this on 9GAG ;)
    – William
    Commented Sep 26, 2014 at 15:06

3 Answers 3

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Two things - it's on the hot network question list, and it's on Hacker News. It's also the sort of thing that geeks find hilarious.

I'd add it doesn't have one answer - we've occasionally had to shove a few bad answers out the airlock.

These things just occasionally happen ;)

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I posted the toaster question as I genuinely wanted to know what was going on with the toaster icon and was completely confused by it.

I'd googled around a bunch for it but couldn't find anything about it at the time. About half an hour after posting it I found someone else with the same question on Microsoft's own support site but no proper answer as to why that it had a toaster icon.

The accepted answer seems to be the real reason behind why it happened and it would have just been a slight curio for me but apparently it got picked up by a few people and went mad.

It's clearly not a great, useful question/answer combo but it is reasonably funny (although also not that funny) and now the next time someone wonders why their ACER wireless keyboard has a toaster icon in device manager they'll be able to much more easily find the answer in Google :)

I'd also like to just say that I didn't cross post it anywhere, it seemed to just go of it's own accord. Apparently it hit Hacker's News, Reddit and was briefly trending on Twitter.

I guess the internet just loves toast.

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In addition to those two sources mentioned by Journeyman Geek, this question has also appeared on reddit, under the /r/sysadmin sub amongst others. That subreddit alone drew at least 10,000 individual visits.

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    Like I said, I Googled the title and got at least 20 hits (as far as I looked), mostly what appeared to be blogs or forums. I suppose you could argue it "went viral", but it seems to me (given that the posts are all identical) that one of the parties decided to spam those sites.
    – Daniel R Hicks
    Commented Aug 8, 2014 at 11:52
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    @DanielRHicks A lot of these sites use reddit as a source for news, information or other things.
    – Wolfish
    Commented Aug 8, 2014 at 12:07
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    I think it was under /r/programmerhumor as well.
    – Cruncher
    Commented Aug 18, 2014 at 20:02
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    I should subscribe to that...
    – Wolfish
    Commented Aug 19, 2014 at 14:39
  • @Wolfish, Save yourself some time.
    – Pacerier
    Commented May 20, 2015 at 7:52

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