One Million Checkboxes: the website a crowd checked to the end

One Million Checkboxes is a website that once handed the entire internet a single shared grid of a million checkboxes and let everyone tick them at the same time. That collaborative version is over, and the site now says so plainly, but it is still worth a visit: it stands as a memorial to one of 2024's strangest crowd experiments, and it still lets a lone visitor start checking boxes into the void.

In brief

• One Million Checkboxes, at onemillioncheckboxes.com, is a grid of exactly one million checkboxes; for two weeks in 2024, every visitor shared the same grid in real time.
• It was built in about two days by Nolen Royalty, who posts as eieio, and launched on 26 June 2024, according to Wikipedia.
• Over its run the site logged roughly 650 million check and uncheck actions, per Wikipedia, before its creator switched off the shared version after two weeks.
• Today the page reads "we checked every box" and offers a solo mode, so the sheer scale survives even though the crowd has gone home.

What you find at One Million Checkboxes today

Open onemillioncheckboxes.com now and the mood is elegiac. A banner announces, in the site's own words, that "we checked every box," and a smaller line offers a consolation: a visitor can still play alone if they like. Click through and the counter resets to zero, the label changes to note that the visitor is playing by themselves, and a fresh field of empty checkboxes stretches down the page.

Scrolling the solo grid is its own quiet lesson in scale. The checkboxes are small, and a single screen holds only a few hundred, so reaching the end by scrolling alone would take a very long time. That is what the Jump box is for. Typing a number near one million drops the visitor straight into the far end of a page that seems to have no bottom. A million is an easy figure to say and a hard one to feel, and the grid makes the gap between the two uncomfortably plain.

Solo, the site is quieter and slightly melancholy. Boxes tick when clicked and stay ticked, but no one else is watching, and nothing pushes back. A "Jump" field lets a visitor leap to any checkbox by number, from one to one million, which is the fastest way to grasp how absurdly long the grid really is. It is less a game now than a preserved artefact, a place to stand where a small internet event once happened.

A million boxes, shared by everyone at once

The original idea was almost stupidly simple, which is usually the sign of a good one. The page held exactly one million checkboxes, and, crucially, every visitor saw the same grid. Ticking a box on one screen ticked it on every other screen, more or less instantly. There were no accounts, no scores that counted and no goal beyond the shared, pointless act of checking and unchecking boxes together.

Making that feel instant for a large crowd was the hard part. In his own writeup, creator Nolen Royalty explains that the state of every box was stored as raw bits, so a million checkboxes fit into about 125 kilobytes, small enough for the server to shuttle around cheaply. Royalty, who posts as eieio, first built the site in Python, then rewrote the backend in Go with a friend when traffic overwhelmed it, according to Wikipedia.

Live, the effect was hypnotic and faintly chaotic. The tally at the top of the page climbed and fell as the global count of checked boxes swung with the crowd, and any box a visitor ticked might be unticked by a stranger a second later. The result was a tug of war with no sides and no finish line, a shared surface that never settled, which turned out to be oddly absorbing to watch and much harder to leave than it had any right to be.

The two weeks it was live

Wikipedia records that One Million Checkboxes launched on 26 June 2024 and ran for about two weeks. Royalty has said he built the whole thing in roughly two days after a conversation with a friend, and bought the domain for ten dollars, which makes the scale of what followed faintly ridiculous. A weekend project is not supposed to end up in the newspaper.

The crowd arrived fast. Wikipedia reports that around 400,000 unique visitors took part, while Royalty's own account puts the number of people on the site at once as high as half a million. Together they generated something like 650 million individual check and uncheck actions over the run, the figure Wikipedia cites as the site's headline statistic. For a page with one feature and no purpose, that is an extraordinary amount of clicking.

The secret hidden in the checkboxes

The best part of the story is one the creator did not plan. A few days in, Royalty dumped the raw bytes of the checkbox state to check on the server and noticed something odd: web addresses appearing in the data. As he tells it in his essay on the project, his first thought was a security breach. The truth was stranger. Someone was writing him a message in binary.

A group of teenagers had worked out that the grid was really one long string of ones and zeros, and that checking the right boxes in the right order could spell out ASCII text. They used the trick to hide a link to a private Discord server, named after the act of checking boxes, where they coordinated. Royalty describes the group as "some very sharp teens" who reverse-engineered the site's rate limits and built bots to paint with the boxes.

From binary notes to a working Rickroll

What they made escalated. Reading the million checkboxes as a 1000 by 1000 grid, the group rendered images, QR codes and nested layers of hidden messages inside one another. Once Royalty removed the rate limits near the end, the bots managed animated pictures, including a Windows blue screen and, on the final night, a working Rickroll. A one-line toy had quietly turned into a collaborative canvas with its own secret backchannel.

Why one person switched it off

One Million Checkboxes did not die of neglect; its creator ended it on purpose. Royalty sunset the shared version after about two weeks and, in a fittingly generous move, took the rate limits off first so the botters could see how far they could push the grid before the lights went out. The Washington Post later ran a piece on what happened to the site, treating a page of checkboxes as a genuine cultural moment worth explaining.

Running something at that scale for free is not weightless, and part of the reason to admire the project is that it knew when to stop. Rather than let a viral toy curdle into an obligation, Royalty closed the shared grid while it was still fondly regarded, and left the memorial page in its place. That kind of restraint is rarer online than the viral hit itself.

What came next: One Million Chessboards

The idea did not end with checkboxes. In 2025 Royalty released a successor, One Million Chessboards, which, as Wikipedia describes it, spreads a thousand by a thousand playable chessboards across a single shared plane. It found an audience quickly, too: Wikipedia records more than 150,000 players making over 15 million moves in the first ten days.

The through-line is clear. Take one familiar, low-stakes interface, a checkbox or a chessboard, multiply it to an absurd degree, and let a crowd share the result in real time. The novelty is never any single box or board but the strange social weather that forms when hundreds of thousands of strangers poke at the same enormous object at once.

Why a page of checkboxes struck a nerve

Part of the appeal was the sheer disproportion between the interface and the response. A checkbox is the most mundane control on the web, a thing people tick without thinking on forms and consent banners, and One Million Checkboxes took that tiny gesture and made it communal, visible and oddly charged. Doing something pointless is one thing. Doing it in real time alongside hundreds of thousands of strangers is another.

It also worked as an accidental portrait of how crowds behave when handed a blank, consequence-free space. Some visitors patiently checked boxes in order. Others raced to undo whatever had just been done. A determined few, as it turned out, treated the grid as a canvas and a cipher at once. Give a large enough group a shared surface and no rules, and they will invent both art and mischief without being asked.

Where it sits in the quiet web

One Million Checkboxes belongs to a small family of sites built around a single number so large it stops feeling real. Anyone taken by that scale should visit Every UUID, which scrolls patiently through a list far longer than a mere million entries. For the social side, the odd pleasure of sharing a screen with unseen strangers, Cursor Camp offers a room where visitors mill about as tiny arrows.

It sits comfortably in the wider tradition of the calm, single-purpose web that this blog spends its time cataloguing, the same corner mapped out in the roundup of useless websites to visit when bored. That spirit runs through the whole hand-picked collection at boringwebsites.art, which gathers the web's quieter oddities in one place.

FAQ

Is One Million Checkboxes still working?

Partly. The shared, multiplayer version that let everyone tick the same grid was shut down about two weeks after it launched in 2024. The site at onemillioncheckboxes.com is still online, but it now shows a message saying every box was checked and offers a solo mode, where a single visitor can check boxes on their own with no one else present.

Who made One Million Checkboxes?

It was made by Nolen Royalty, a software engineer and game developer who posts under the handle eieio. According to Wikipedia, he built the site in about two days and launched it on 26 June 2024. He has since written a detailed essay about the project and released a follow-up, One Million Chessboards, in 2025.

What was the secret hidden in the checkboxes?

A group of teenagers realised the million checkboxes could be read as binary and used them to encode hidden ASCII messages, including a link to a private Discord server. As Royalty recounts in his essay, they built bots to draw images across the grid, eventually rendering things like a Windows blue screen and an animated Rickroll once the site's rate limits were lifted near the end.

How many people used it?

A great many, for a page of checkboxes. Wikipedia reports roughly 400,000 unique visitors, and the creator has described as many as half a million people on the site at once. Over its two-week run, the site logged about 650 million individual check and uncheck actions, which remains its most-quoted statistic.

More boring websites like this: Single-purpose websites.