2014 Polandball April Fools

On April 1st, 2014, most rules and policies on /r/polandball were lifted. This was done to emphasize the importance of the fairly strict rules and tutorial and as an April Fools joke. From observing the course of this prank there can be concluded that the rules (which are often called 'fascist' by the /r/polandball community) are extremely important to keep the quality of polandball comics (and comment sections) high.

The announcement
Early on April 1st, /u/polandballmod posted 'an important announcement', saying that 'the original creator of Polandball (Falco)' had returned to /r/polandball. In honour of this, they would remove several (important) rules and restrictions of the subreddit, most notably removing 'approved submitters'.

The announcement (which has been removed) read as follows:

After the announcement
Opinions on this first serious-appealing announcement were mixed. The logo of polandball was also changed (lines added, flashy red color) and the red color on the layout was brighter (#FF00).

The comment section was intentionally spammed with comments that would have otherwise not been allowed, such as huge text walls, spamming the word "le", and other ironic posts. The same things and similiar could be found in most comment sections during that time.

Since comment sections were no longer going to be moderated, memes, image macros, reaction gifs, shibe/dolan talk and others could be posted, which would otherwise be removed on sight.

During the 24h rule break
Soon after the announcement was posted, /r/polandball was spammed with (often ironically) bad comics and other shitposting, immediately decreasing overall quality of the subreddit. Common topics/themes of these comics were:


 * Allahu Ackbörk/ Muslim/Jihad Sweden (example)
 * Comics overusing and applying forced memes like doge (example)
 * Comics with overly amounts of "le" (example)
 * Nazi comics (example)
 * Comics that force everything that was then allowed that normally isn't (example)
 * Generally very poorly drawn and low effort comics with not much plotline at all (example)

This caused utter chaos and confusion among many users of /r/polandball, it is said that many users also unsubscribed the subreddit that day.

Some high quality comics were reposted but adapted to the new 'rules' in protest.

Aftermath
On April 2nd, all changes made the day before were removed without further notice, and the original 'Import Announcement' was deleted. /u/FALCOLAD was a fake account created by mods in an effort to imitate the legitimate "Falco". It was given moderator permissions (for more realistic appeal) for a day, but is now unused and no longer a moderator.

The logo and layout of the subreddit were restored, as were the polandball tutorial and comment policy. All non-country flairs were added again.

All blatant shitposts were put on a special page (found here) in the wiki and removed from the front page. This is to demonstrate what can happen if there are no (or very few) rules.