Happy April Fool’s Day to everyone who has chosen to venture into the dark and murky depths of the web on this most irksome day. Public Service Announcement, do not believe anything that you read online today, especially if it’s about series 8 spoilers or missing episodes. But you didn’t need to be told that, right? To save you some time and possible heartbreak, I thought I would collect some of the better/more interesting pranks out there today.

Let’s start with the rumour that Arthur Darvill is returning to Doctor Who! Amazing, Rory’s going to be back? No, he’s going to play the Master. Good one. I had a chuckle when I read that. Then there was the one that Peter Capaldi was actually going to play the Master, not the doctor.

Things get more elaborate from there, though. The next one was set up on a page to look like the BBC news and says that tv signals from the 60’s have recently been bouncing back to Earth from space . Of course Doctor Who missing episodes were among those signals. They have been recorded and will eventually be released on dvd. Full marks for the effort, but not the most ingenious idea, I’ve heard something like this before.

UPDATE: turns out I fell for this one. If you look at the date on the article, it’s actually from 5 years ago. That confirms my suspicion that I had heard something like this before, probably when I read this for the first time many years ago.

Did you hear about the Supernatural/Sherlock/Doctor Who crossover show being done by CW and the BBC?

The BBC and CW announce joint ‘Superwholock’ show coming in 2014 – http://t.co/1ghDIBEnD3 pic.twitter.com/sUjK7aCtd9

— Hypable.com (@Hypable) April 1, 2014

And finally here’s a fake online ad for Marco Polo pre-orders. Quite pricy though.

@Eddie_At_Skaro pic.twitter.com/K5tmNqyW9u

— Frank Xerri (@Frank_Xerri) April 1, 2014

UPDATE: Special mention has to go to the Doctor Who Germany Facebook Group that lost 23 members when they posted that they were no longer allowing discussion of David Tennant or the RTD era of Doctor Who.

So that’s where we stand, the best of the pranks and jokes for April 1, 2014.