I made the mistake, many years ago, of publishing an April Fools Day joke column in the San Jose Mercury News. The piece, co-written with Michael Schrage, a friend, reported that Stanford University had decided to take itself public — that is, become a publicly traded for-profit company — because so many billions of dollars were available for harvest from suckers during the tech boom of the late 1990s.

The column, only available today from behind a paywall, started:

Just when you think Silicon Valley’s e-mania couldn’t get any more extreme, it does. Get ready for the Stanford University dot-com IPO.

Yes, Stanford — the academic institution most responsible for seeding the valley’s high-bandwidth culture of innovation and entrepreneurship — wants in on the action in a more direct way.

And you know what? It makes more sense than a lot of the deals we’ve seen.

Sources say the university is planning to bundle together some of its key assets and sell shares in an initial public offering sometime this summer. And the valuation looks like it’ll be north of $100 billion.

The insiders in this deal are fighting among themselves about everything — from the underwriter to the name of the spinoff. Stanford.com has been rejected as ”too close to the offline brand,” according to a deal memo we’ve seen. Some of the possible names include eStanford.com and iStanford.com (the ”i” would stand for ”Internet”).

Naturally, Wall Street institutions are already warring over this deal. Every big investment bank wants the lead position in the IPO. So it’s more than a little surprising to hear that Weeke & Chernem Securities — the bank that took the ill-fated, sleazy eTattler.com public a year ago — seems to have the inside track.

I arrived at the office that morning and found several voicemail (remember voicemail) messages. One of them was an inquiry about how to invest. Another was from a tech executive who said, “You really me going there — until I realized it was a joke.”

However clever Michael and I might have been with that piece, it was a bad idea. I came to realize that satire on the Internet should be left solely to the experts. Only one site is consistently superb in this category, the Onion. The rest of us are nowhere by comparison, and our chief accomplishment is to confuse people.

That’s why the endless torrent of April Fools jokes on the Internet is an endless error in judgment. Anyone who’s planning an April 1 gag, I beg you, please don’t.

The best advice on April 1 remains something that I found more than 15 years ago at Twitter, from someone named Prentiss Riddle. He wrote: “What I like about April Fool’s Day: one day a year we’re asking whether news stories are true. It should be all 365.”