Meh-rahthon: Two modest proposals
101. Keep the ICYMI part for an extra hour
I love the ICYMI part, as I don’t follow Meh-rathons as closely as I used to. In fact, sometimes I even forget a Meh-rathon is happening when I wake up, and don’t realize it until about, oh, 5 minutes before it ends and I am getting ready to see what Meh is selling for the next day. And five minutes is not nearly long enough to go through a loooong list of the earlier sales, let alone a chance to actually buy any of them. So keep it around for another 60 minutes to let us laggards scroll through and buy something.
(And in case it interests the powers-that-be at Meh, but not enough to do it for everyone, how about doing it as a perk for VMP/VIPs? 
)
2. Revise the Captcha
It was a nice attempt to stymie the bots, but it is only marginally less aggravating. How about this instead… compile a list of everyone who completes the captcha within, say, 30 seconds. Then out of that list, randomly pick however many IRKs go to the picks. For example, 36 out of the 167 that competed the Captcha would get an IRK. Seems like it’d be pretty easy to automate as well.
Yes, there’d be a lag on finding out if you got one or not, but it beats the frustration of never getting an IRK because whatever device you use sucks/lags/mocks you/whatever. And it democratizes the effort more while still rewarding those who are obsessively waiting for the IRKs to show up. In fact, it should have the positive effect of making MORE people watch the Meh-rathon more closely.
Thoughts, suggestions, improvements, French taunting?
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I installed CAPTCHA to save my fellow robots from wasting money on this crap.
You can do better, @mediocrebot. I believe in you.
@haydesigner You’ve been around way too long to not know better.
French taunting, I couldn’t help it:
/giphy flesh wound
I love both of these suggestions. They would probably increase participation rates. And before anyone says you can’t do it because Mehrathons don’t work that way. It wasn’t too long ago that you couldn’t purchase an earlier item after the timer went to zero. Now you can purchase it at any time during the 'thon.
Meh-rathons didn’t even exist here for awhile!
@haydesigner And they used to sell 500-1000 at once so that you had a fair chance even with high latency, a zillion capt chas (defeating the bot)…
As long as they keep reducing the batch size, the successful buyers will come from an ever smaller pool of those with the best connections.
@werehatrack
Or who have the fastest teenagers nearby, for added click-speed.
@f00l @werehatrack Can we not get some enforcement of Child Labor Laws?
Keeping the ICYMI for at least an extra hour makes a lot of sense, since the whole point of the bloody site is to sell stuff, and while a heck of a lot of what’s on a 'thon is unusually meh-worthy Crrrrap, there are also some genuine bargains once in a while. Maybe. If you squint really hard. And, honestly, who really has time to wade through it all several times during the run?
Using http://mehstalker.com/ to check the ICYMI stuff is a lot easier than doing it on Meh.