The phenomenon known as “RickRolling” is certainly nothing new. Millions have been duped into watching Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. And many, like myself, have had it done multiple times.

Some strategies to Rickrolling a would be victim might include

• Non-specific Youtube link
• Use of URL shorteners like Bit.ly or Goo.gl
• URL re-direction

I’d like to take the URL re-direction bullet, make it a bit overly technical, and unleash what I am convinced is an undetectable rick roll method. Prerequisites include an apache web server with mod rewrite (probably do-able with IIS as well, but I am unaware of rewriting URLs in IIS).

• Create a folder in the root of your web directory. Name the folder something like “index.html”.
• Inside that folder, create a file named .htaccess (note the leading dot. Required in the name)
• Put the following text inside that .htaccess file:
  
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0" [R=301,L]


• Now, you can link somebody to http://www.yoursite.com/index.html and they will immediately be forwarded to Rick Astley.

I went ahead and implimented this for display purposes here: http://www.ericvb.com/yeah.html