gbulmash's Journal: Decoding The Mysterious Future - A Mini Slashdot Effect

If you're a /. subscriber, you get to see stories before they're publicly posted (i.e. open for comment). On the story's comments section, they like to say "Posting will only be possible in The Mysterious Future!"

One problem. Those stories go up on the Firehose with their post time labeled on them. It'll say something like "Posted by Zonk on Thursday October 18, @02:10PM", only it's 1:45 PM. "02:10PM" is "The Mysterious Future". Now you have some time to compose your post in a text editor and copy it to your clipboard. At 2:10, the "reply" button appears on the page. For tne next minute or so, you'll get an error message instead of a form for posting. Then the system is ready and you get the posting form.

You type in your subject, paste in your response, count to "fifteen-one-thousand" to ensure you've waited the required 20 seconds from hitting the page to posting your comment... voila. First post.

And if you make it reasonably intelligent, it gets modded up enough so everyone visiting that discussion sees your post. If you've got a link in your .sig, you'll get a mini Slashdot effect (maybe 50 hits).

I wouldn't suggest marketing via the .sig in a first post as an effective marketing plan, but the traffic's a nice side benefit. Primarily the benefit is that just about everyone reads your post and you stop some idiot who would post GNAA stuff or "first post!" from getting there first.

Subscribers only still

[HTH NE1]

You would still need to be a subscriber to see approved stories before they hit the front page. Early Firehose traffic would show those both to subscribers and non-subscribers. Now Firehose versions remain Firehose versions for non-subscribers, but more frequently linked to from the main story (possibly only if there were Firehose-comments, but it seems no one bothers with reading or modding them from there).