I give up. You win.
7At least during most of the recent Mehrathons wasting a whole day has been rewarded with an IRK at some point during the 24 hour cycle. But with 21+ IRKs each go round, getting an IRK has been almost impossible.
I even put of my “I love IRK” tee shirt hoping it would bring me good luck but no dice.
To further my descent into darkness during this mehrathon, I have gotten numerous CAPTCHA when trying to order an IRK which I have never gotten before. I may have to begin therapy after this mehrathon as my self worth is now very low.
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Now you don’t have to buy anything to regret it.
Honestly, my last few IRKs have been so negligible, I think I’m better skipping this mehrathon.
@brainmist You could buy stuff they actually make money on. Just a thought.
@brainmist @sammydog01 But pretty much all the stuff they offer they have sold before or it is on one of the other sites or will go back to them if they didn’t sell out here during this. There seems to rarely be actual new stuff since (I am presuming) these are their fire sale days.
@sammydog01 Oooooh, I do plenty of that too. sips cold brew from Meh while surveying the debris from Meh dog toys and hoping the steel hose from Meh will hold up to the piranha
I have yet to successfully buy one ever, but from the reports I’ve seen about the contents of the “successes”, I’m starting to think that I’m the luckiest one of the bunch. 94 meh-clicks today, zero success with the IRKs (as usual).
@werehatrack I clicked over 80 today with no luck. If they are now going to only sell 21 at a shot-my IRK buying days are over-got one last time when the were selling lots of 50 and considered myself lucky. Have gotten over 25 IRKs and probably the holy grail of IRKs which contained a new x-box series x worth over $ 500 so can’t really complain too much.
No chance if I get the captcha.
I nowadays get the captcha.
Beep beep boop boop. (I assume if you failed CAPTCHA you now understand Robot.)
Only had 5 shots at an IRK (I have a job, I had to sleep), got green-barred each time.
The last three IRKS I received have been beyond regret and disappointment, bordering on despair, still I’m sure I will miss out on something …
@stolicat They get us with intermittent positive reinforcement. Doing that results in the behavior that is really hard to extinguish (eg us showing up and trying to buy them) while they hope we will impulse buy something else while we are here.
I missed nearly all of them. Between work. Then taking a break from work to see if there was anything nifty that I missed. Come back to the main page and just missed an irk ☹
I had no chance of getting an IRK this time due to the minuscule quantity and my lousy connection. But overall I think I might be happy about not getting one considering how regretful they have been for me lately. I figure I saved myself more regret and five bucks.
@heartny i hope you saved some doe also …
Honestly, I only bothered in the evening because I was sitting at a computer with two monitors and only needed one.
I’ve only ever got an IRK when it’s been 100 at a time. Anything less and I don’t stand a chance.
Had I not had the empty monitor going i wouldn’t have bothered with the Mehrathon this time.
@OnionSoup I never had luck with an IRK <100 before, but I succeeded yesterday!
/giphy you can do it
@replicacobra I did try, quite a number of times, but my connection is too slow to win those small drops.
@OnionSoup @replicacobra Same issue I have only it is slow enough that even with 100 not so likely unless the site is having a glitch.
If you did not get a IRK, blame the GOAT
/giphy Blame goat
I spent most of my working morning yesterday watching the site to catch every refresh. I have pretty good internet and devices; it occasionally takes a few tries but I’ve never gotten “perfect” refreshes and missed the IRK six times in a row, until yesterday.
I don’t know if the goal was to have more IRKs throughout the day and keep people engaged, but it backfired. I grew less and less interested and forgot to even check for the 11th hour IRK, let alone look at the rest of the deals in the afternoon and evening. Maybe that makes me a bad mehmber with no dedication but whatever.
It’s one thing to be distracted and miss a click, that encourages me to try harder next time; it’s quite another to do everything I can correctly and still fail, that just makes me stop caring.
@geekahedron I’m sure someone at Meh is in charge of determining if smaller quantities and more IRK is to their benefit, but like you after I determined that my chances of getting one were nill, I left for long periods of time. I counted the # of IRKs and they had more than usual but not enough to equal dropping the # of IRKs in each offering down from 50 to 21.
Now if the stuff in these IRKs is substantially better than the stuff in the IRKs where many more is sent out then that might keep people’s interest.
But if the purpose is the keep people on the site during the mehrathon to buy the other crap, think they have failed big time.
I really don’t get the whole IRK thing. If I need some useless crap, I will just go look in the closet.
@macromeh That’s where I keep my useless IRK crap.
@Barney @macromeh The IRK was coming from inside the house…
@macromeh ever play the lottery?
You won’t win, but there is fun in hoping. With the lottery when you lose, you have extra trash to take out.
With an IRK when you lose you get trackrs that you can take to the movies and throw at people who are on the phone during the flick.
@OnionSoup Nope, never have. (I can do math.)
However, I did marry a second time, so I think I get the concept. “The triumph of hope over experience.”
You’d be better off giving $5 to a stranger and have them randomly shop for items for you in a Dollar store!! Might get your money’s worth then.
/giphy take my money
I have a problem. The meh countdown clocks are different on my laptop and phone. Sometimes the phone is 1-2 seconds ahead, sometimes the laptop. It’s quite likely both timers are slower than those of others.
Also, wondering if the items have even-numbered times. When I reload, the short ones start at ~1:52, for instance. How does that work for others, is the time actually 2 minutes and I’m that far behind, or is my device accurate?
Could explain the lack of success.
@kdemo
By experimentation, I have established that going for a page refresh via the upper left logo prior to near zero on my desktop system results in a useless reload of the exiting item page, but on my phone it gets the desired result with 2 seconds left. The two timers are about that far apart. Via various practiced actions, on my desktop I have the time from page refresh through non-image captcha to the “buy it” click down to under two seconds, and that is still too slow. On the phone, necessary scrolling eliminates all hope. I have concluded that for the near term, trying to score an IRK is counterproductive, so I will wait until it appears that there has been a paradigm shift. Until then I’ll check the ICYMI link late in the 'thon, and if a good item sells out, so be it.
Beep beep boop boop. (I assume if you failed CAPTCHA you now understand Robot.)
@werehatrack I seem to get that useless reload on both phone and laptop if I refresh too soon even after hitting zero. Agree it feels hopeless and counterproductive.
I have backed away before, IRK withdrawal is not as challenging as one might expect.
Freedom!!
@kdemo
On further consideration, there’s a potential explanation for the continual failures that might make sense of both of the issues. If what you and I are actually seeing is not live content direct from the meh server, but a cached copy from a proxy, that might explain the reason why next-item timers seem to start p[artway into the first minute. Perhaps when we’re seeing the countdown approaching zero, the real timer has already run out, and the unproxied users are already done with the successful transactions. I don’t know enough about the nuts and bolts of how proxies work to be able to say if this is a valid concern.
@werehatrack - I don’t completely understand that, yet it still makes sense. I’d be curious to know if others have a different experience, perhaps those with more success?
@kdemo First suggestion - sync your computer clock. If you’re using Windows 10, right click the time in the bottom corner. Select ‘Adjust date/time.’ In the window that opens, click ‘Sync now.’ That should definitely help match up the time to the countdown on meh.
@cinoclav - Oooh - good idea! I forgot I actually have an atomic clock. I synced the laptop time and it’s still almost 30 seconds behind the atomic clock. I’ll put the clock in an eastern facing window overnight and see if they are closer in the morning.
Thanks!
@cinoclav @kdemo so, here’s what’s happening folks.
The timers on the page are using JavaScript…which, is notoriously horrible at being super-accurate for time reporting. It’s based off your browser, not mercatalyst’s servers, and isn’t capable of tracking even to the millisecond.
Works great with being a fun little animation…but, very seldom will it be accurate with the server time, which, is what the change-overs will be based off of.
Best bet is to ensure your time is sync’d on the device and refresh according to that Vs. the webpage timer.
/giphy wrong clock
@PHRoG - Thanks. If I understand correctly, that will work at the midnight changeover, but not during a mehrathon when we can’t know the actual changeover timing? Now I’m rather amazed that anyone ever succeeds at this devious game.
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
@kdemo @PHRoG Pretty much my point in saying to make sure the laptop time is synced.
@kdemo it really depends on the the device/browser/networking configurations.
Older/slower/low memory devices, browser plugins/extensions, VPN connections, home networking/ISP networking/hardware…and so on, can make significant differences on the time observed by the JavaScript Date.now function.
Sooo, it’s kinda hard to say which would be the best way to get in sync with the server. It’s going to be unique for each person. Best suggestion I can think to give if someone thinks they’re out of sync would be to start refreshing several seconds before the time is about to roll over.
Or, use a secondary known-accurate clock to observe the changeover at the top of the minute.
@cinoclav @kdemo yes, but, it’s quite possible there could be factors present on the laptop (device) that would have the counter still out of sync.
If someone believes their sync with the JavaScript timer is off, best bet is to validate via a 2nd, known-good, source for current time and observe the top-of-the-minute changeover against the meh.com page.
I personally use my wrist watch (which, is typically fairly accurate with the JavaScript timer)…but, I’ve definitely seen it be out of sync before too.
@PHRoG @cinoclav - What I meant by changeover timing - how do we know meh refreshes mehrathon items at the top of the minute? Refreshing device before it reaches zero is useless.
At any rate, overnight I synced my atomic clock with Colorado. It now matches the synced laptop which matches phone clock. Now all I need is another mehrathon.
Bring it on!
@kdemo Well, I usually sync my computer every time there’s a mehrathon and I’ve landed an irk every time. So…
@cinoclav Gee, it’s too bad you didn’t get one from the Kickstarter.
@Barney Too bad I didn’t know about the site until after it had launched.
@cinoclav Yeah… Too bad no one told you about it.
I don’t understand how the sessions with meh work. The mehahton before last, I was still signed into my wife’s account. I bought something under her account a month before… She got the irk not me.
@joebuddah - She won’t share?
@kdemo She will. Its more of the bragging rights/ who gets to open it.
What’s wrong with this picture? One of the browsers is pointed at a VPN pipe, the other runs across Xfinity’s proxies (if any), and the phone does its own thing. Why does the phone show an earlier end time for the current meh item? Given the split, I think this may show why some of us simply can’t get an IRK, ever.
@werehatrack - Curious - is this a different issue than above?
@kdemo
It seems to be a confirmation that not only is there a discrepancy, but it can be more than just one or two seconds. I had observed a two-second mismatch a couple opf weeks ago on the road, but I had not thought to see how much there might be here. Five seconds? That’s more than enough to explain the whole problem with never being successful at getting an IRK.
But it doesn’t explaim why there’s a discrepancy, it merely confirms that it’s an apparent issue.
@kdemo @werehatrack gave this answer above, but, putting here too in case it gets missed.
The timers on the page are using JavaScript…which, is notoriously horrible at being super-accurate for time reporting. It’s based off your browser, not mercatalyst’s servers, and isn’t capable of tracking even to the millisecond.
Works great with being a fun little animation…but, very seldom will it be accurate with the server time, which, is what the change-overs will be based off of.
Best bet is to ensure your time is sync’d on the device and refresh according to that Vs. the webpage timer.
@kdemo @PHRoG
So how does one synch the local timer with the server, then? It seems worse than pointless for that countdown to be present and misleading. I don’t know how we can get around it when there doesn’t seem to be a way to determine the time setting of the server in question. And does the script prevent the page from being refetched when the timer has not yet zeroed? On the Android app, in particular, there seems to be no way to force a reload beyond the top-left button click.
@kdemo @PHRoG Okay, I went back to the thread above, and got some intel, but…
Are the Mehrathon timers set to refresh at a Naval Observatory minute boundary plus or minus latency/conditions error, or is it an arbitrary and unknown one?
For the moment, I’ll assume that a NIST-minute boundary is the target, and I’ve set the local clock to synch with nist-a.gov automagically. And now I’ll just wait for the next rollover and see what I can determine.
@kdemo @PHRoG @werehatrack Can’t you just pick any mehrathon item, refresh for a while, and get the count so you know when to refresh for an irk?
Hi @sammydog01!
I know when it happens on my clock. I was trying to find out if my experience was different from that of others.
Even refreshing too soon after it hits zero will reload the expired item. Then, when the new item appears it is always 5 to 10 seconds after the top of the minute according to my clock. I was asking if the turnover actually happens at the top of the minute. cinoclav had the good suggestion to sync clocks. Remains to be seen if it makes a difference.
@kdemo
/giphy hi