Actually, the reverse, I have discovered, can be a problem.

A couple of years ago, I put up an April Fool’s article on my routine history column. https://worldoftanks.com/en/news/chieftain/T28_in_Korea/

It revolved around a massive, 100-ton tank of which the US built two. For some reason, the US records showed one as having been destroyed in a fire, the other scrapped, but 27 years later, one showed up sitting in a field. Obviously, public records for this vehicle are not.... complete and accurate.

I also dug up in the Archives some photographs of the vehicle which, if they had ever been published before, received almost zero circulation.

This, I thought, provided opportunity to invent some story about the vehicle being sent off to combat. My problem was that I was too good. I went to the extent of researching which ships may have made trans-Pacific transit at the right timeframe to carry this thing on the supposed jaunt to Korea. Indeed, the only obvious indicator that I was lying (other than the publication date, and the unusual fact that nobody had ever heard of this vehicle going overseas) was that the ship I named, if you looked it up, had a different sort of bow ramp than the one in the picture.

Of course, people don’t look at the date of the article, and it started making the rounds being presented as actual history. My follow-on article the next week, the first sentence was “guys, it was an April Fool’s thing, look at the date.”

I started damage control. I followed links to different forums, where I would register and post that it was a fake article. Two years later, such links were still being posted, when I stopped trying. Of course, many times, it’s not even a link to the earlier article with the date, just “I believe that I heard that T28 was sent to Korea....”

Cautionary lesson has been learned.