April Fools' Day Request for Comments
humorous technical standard proposal
A Request for Comments (RFC), in the context of Internet governance, is a type of publication from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Society (ISOC), usually describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems.
Almost every April Fools' Day (1 April) since 1989, the Internet RFC Editor has published one or more humorous Request for Comments (RFC) documents, following the June 1973 RFC 527 called ARPAWOCKY, a parody of Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "Jabberwocky". The following list also includes humorous RFCs published on other dates.
List of April Fools' Day RFCs
1978
RFC 748 – "TELNET RANDOMLY-LOSE Option," Status Unknown.
1989
RFC 1097 – "TELNET SUBLIMINAL-MESSAGE Option," Status Unknown.
1990
RFC 1149 – "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers," Experimental.
1991
RFC 1216 – "Gigabit Network Economics and Paradigm Shifts," Informational.
RFC 1217 – "Memo from the Consortium for Slow Commotion Research (CSCR)," Informational.
1992
RFC 1313 – "Today's Programming for KRFC AM 1313 Internet Talk Radio," Informational.
1993
RFC 1437 – "The Extension of MIME Content-Types to a New Medium," Informational.
The public source identifies “April Fools' Day Request for Comments” as humorous technical standard proposal. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around April, Fools' and Request.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “April Fools' Day Request for Comments”, the useful work is to connect “humorous technical standard proposal” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1322187. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1989, 1973, 1978 and 1097.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “April Fools' Day Request for Comments” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.