Mehathon Review
30I gotta say Meh, you knocked it out of the park for being the first one. Granted I didn’t buy a lot of stuff this time around, it was fun anyway. I think my favorite part was the timer that told you when the next item would be. Sure saved a lot of F5 smashing on my end. Wasn’t a big fan of the quanity of hour long products, but it being your first time out of the gate I understand the logic behind it. I applaud you Meh crew for failing to make the inaugural mehathon completely mediocre.
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meh
I liked it. I liked the VMP only sales. I think it would be better to start a new product immediately, rather than have to wait for the timer to complete, but it did let me know I could safely get coffee or pee or whatever. So maybe that’s OK?
Are you considering a regular frequency of these or was this truly a one-off from your perspective?
@ACraigL im guessing these will replace fuku days, since on most fuku days they have 1 item in stock for literally 90 seconds , this way they have stuff for sale all day of fuku days
@ACraigL I don’t know whether to laugh or cry - but I can guarantee that wasn’t the last Meh-rathon.
@ACraigL I like the timers.
/giphy boo to you
@Pavlov
Choose, depending on how high you are right now.
; )
@f00l Maybe a little of both.
@Pavlov
Maybe just go a little higher then?
Thanks! I’m happy most people seemed to enjoy it.
I’ll say it’s likely we’ll do another one but I have no idea how far away that might be.
@dave
Want swag. Pls pls pls.
@f00l you must be a riot at mardi gras
@cranky1950
Alcohol helps.
@f00l Volunteer to run the next mehxchange and make sure I get you. I’ll send you tons of swag, including the baby body (meh kept the arm for photos).
@f00l
/giphy flying screaming mehnkeys!
@baqui63
Baby body ick ick ick
@f00l More creepy than icky:
@baqui63 Or for the appropriate bribe I can make make an exception to the bribe rule and make the appropriate “random” assignment (but you will have to remind me)
@Kidsandliz You’ve got my IRL email, so send me some suggestions… Odds are good I can provide the bribe(s) you desire.
@baqui63 oooh oooh oooh - meaning I will now be able to live in the style to which I’d like to become accustom??? LOL
@dave AWESOME. Any chance we could get any penny items for the next one?
@joe43wv We are pretty hard coded to not use decimal pricing, mostly because of how much I hate $*.99 prices but I won’t say it’s impossible.
@dave
You could do a Meh-Dollar-Store-Hour during the next Meh-rathon.
@baqui63
I shouldn’t tell you this next, for my own well-being
I Do Not Want That Deconstructed Partial Baby. OK???
That said, she likes chocolate.
I would imagine that there was a lot of keyboard pounding in the Meh office to get set up for the marathon. A lot of work…
@shawn and team deserve great appreciation for keeping the system rolling…but ESPECIALLY for the duct tape logo!
I expect this was a huge undertaking for everyone, writers, image producers, and more in that chain I probably don’t understand…well done!
@mikibell Ha, sat at his packing crate, leaned back and said “code monkeys make so”. They learned a of what not to do from the other site though. It was really enjoyable.
@cranky1950 he has a real desk…
https://meh.com/forum/topics/lets-talk-with-shawn-about-broadcasts
@mikibell Two things: 1) Shawn did an awesome job getting this to work smoothly and essentially without any tech issues at all, and that’s amazing considering we’d never tried anything like this on Meh before. 2) I MADE THE DUCT TAPE LOGO, NOT SHAWN! (Glad you liked it.)
@dave it was awesome!
@dave
Yeah LIKE.
Mostly everything was great. The variety of stuff I didn’t need combined with the journal/write-ups kept my attention the entire time. Staff presence/response was on point too (kudos!)
There were some load issues, but overall it went really smooth. I like having the timer, although having it be impacted by system time isn’t ideal in general. I’d also like to see a max timer of 30 minutes, cuz ain’t nobody got time for that, but I understand that every extra deal launched takes time to prepare and plan, and with it being the first launch test, I was okay with it.
Overall, I give the first meh-rathon a 5/7
@lichme wow, a perfect 5/7? I also liked it, but would have preferred to see fewer high priced items and more “easy impulse-buys.”
Was a super busy day at work, so I didn’t get to participate too much… I liked the timers a lot. The story line was interesting, but amusing. It felt like a choose your path book that was handed from writer to writer each item… Which is awesome by the way.
There is another thread very similar to this one.
Here
I have to say I enjoyed it much more than the motherships sales today. I really liked that the sales went from 5min to 1hour to 5min agian.
VMP only sales were what I have kept the VMP alive for though!
Wish I could have bought more. I missed some great deals I would have liked to have picked up.
You see, I need to work to make money to afford impulse buys. But I worked, which didn’t afford me time to impulse buy. It’s a vicious cycle of me not spending money!
@Bogie Hmm well then you should be able to retire with some money in the bank if you continue with that
savingsspending pattern.I’d hate to see Fuko days go away alltogether, but @communist brings up a good point. Mehbe start them with a Fuko, then the real sale after they’re sold out.
I wasn’t able to stick around for a ton of it, but I enjoyed the variety of crap and the gimmicks like the meh button and the mad ape den.
I missed the vmp only sales. What were they?
I missed the last few episodes of Apocalypse Not (can’t for the life of me remember its real title). Would someone be a hero and point me to a place where I can read the rest of it, please?
@LaVikinga Here ya go.
@LaVikinga https://meh.com/forum/topics/apocalyse-soon-ish-the-combined-meh-rathon-saga
@lichme You’re a good soul. Thank you!
@gregormehndel You guys are the best!
It didn’t go so good for me. I tried to buy 2 things that were not the Switch and the Bag and the deal would not go through. Don’t get me wrong I tried for the Switch and the bag too but I get that I couldn’t get on. The 2nd thing I paid attention, I had time left, about 3 minutes. I tried 2x and then time was up. Maybe the items were super popular, it was the bluetooth headset and the fidget spinner.
The Meh-rathon sucked and meh sucks. The refurbished Dyson DC41 or whatever came up at $99 and my wife was on the phone (I’m in Kuwait). The website wouldn’t process the purchase… it couldn’t see what I was attempting to buy. A Blinding Rage email to Meh received prompt response, but the gist was, “We hate American Soldiers, you’re screwed.”
Boo communist meh, I hate you.
@gimmedat In the interest of transparency, here’s what we actually said:
and your reply was:
@Thumperchick Yeah! That’s what I said!
@Thumperchick I worry that this person is wondering around somewhere with a rifle.
@Barney I just wonder why he and his wife were on the phone instead of devoting their full attention to the meh-rathon!
@gimmedat
please dont compare communism to meh.com
communists dont sell anything
@communist in this scenario, neither did meh.
@communist (or maybe it is @gimmedat) if meh really were communist, we’d all get fukus, but somewhat mediocre ones.
Oh wait. Sorry, that’s socialist.
Communist means that ~140 people (no more) would get really awesome fukus and everyone else would get extremely shitty fukos, possibly including bullets to the brain.
@baqui63
But they would be forced to first manufacture the bullets intended for their brains.
Agreed! It was well designed and executed! The 5-min deals (or in some cases as little as 2.5 minutes after the page finished reloading) were just long enough to keep the pressure and excitement high from product to product. More than an hour of that would have felt tiresome, so the hour-long deals provided that much-needed downtime (to at least get SOMETHING done at the office). And to top it off, the Journal story was possibly my favorite, and kept me excited even when the deals didn’t. In short, they shouldn’t have set the bar so high, and should now do something completely mundane that flops horribly, or else they’ll instill in the fanbase… greater expectations.
So do we get an overview of what all went into creating this event? Kinda like a pre-mortem “Oh, Shit” report?
@mikibell Yes. First, I had to disable email alerts/daily digest, because it was set to send when a new item was detected, and I didn’t want to spam emails.
Then I had to update my scheduled cron jobs to run every minute instead of every 15 minutes (plus a few manual times at rollover) to make sure my data was live.
Then I had to modify the backend of my database, because the deal date/time field was set to be unique, and I was using ‘currentdate 00:00:00’. This was not done until about 4 items in, so I had to backfill the missing data.
Then I had to find the new endDate field in the json feed, and update the “In Stock” button to use the end date/time, minus the current date/time to create a timer.
I also had to update the page so that it auto refreshed, because it wasn’t needed before, I never had it implemented.
I also had to update my partner site to overwrite the static “No Meh-Off” message with something that actually worked, using the same logic as above.
I still have to update sold counts and click face icons manually.
That’s about it I think.
@lichme good job!
@mikibell Maybe an AMA would work better? I’m not sure exactly what people would want to know.
@dave
When was this all decided? (name, format, etc)
What took so damn long?
What ideas had to be thrown out?
Did all go to plan?
@medz
here at Capitalist meh NOTHING goes according to plan
@lichme
Much thx. I owe.
@dave How long did it take to plan the mehoff?
Did the story come first?
What was the most difficult aspect to implement of the entire event?
Was the t-shirt multi product a dry run?
Are the fulfillment people still alive?
@mikibell
1 - About 4 weeks? That was the hard core working through all the distinct parts, we’ve been generally working through the idea for years.
2 - What came first was deciding on the timing schedule (5 minute offers, hour long offers) which led to having 57 events. That then led to everything else (story, offers, skins/meh face idea, etc.)
3 - No, in fact it was probably a bad idea to have a fairly complex event just before the big event. Especially since we were a bit distracted testing everything and reviewing it all. Next time I’ll probably do something simple and straightforward.
4 - As far as I know, but I’m mostly trying to leave them alone until they get through the whole mess.
@medz
1 - Name was decided years ago…sorry, I forget who specifically but the community brainstormed names in the first month of Meh. (Someone find that post!). The format was generally decided around then, obviously based on our history, but the timing aspect of it was just thought through in the last month or so.
2 - Uh…doing other stuff that seemed more important? Also, I recently fully took over scheduling of Meh in general, along with the content stuff, so it got a little more straightforward to set up, since the decisions were largely mine to make (though obviously the actual work was quite a few more people working really hard).
3 - There’s plenty we might try in the future, though the only specifics I can think of were various things we thought about selling but couldn’t get a deal on. That’s pretty normal, though.
4 - Mostly it went according to plan. I think we had one offer that was broken for a couple minutes, and some people saw the timer glitch thing we couldn’t solve for everyone, but really for a new event we’d never tried before it went really smoothly.
@dave https://meh.com/forum/topics/do-our-work-for-us---naming-contest
@dave
i remember that one it was a 5 min item that took over 2 mins to load leaving 3 mins left to buy and the /buy command didnt even work for vmps citing high traffic https://meh.com/forum/topics/3-pack-led-multi-function-lantern-lights-1
Better than Prime Day by far.
@amandapaigem
⭐️
Agree… Prime day is a big let-down. Meh-Rathon made me happy all day for some reason. Well planned and well-executed. Kudos to the Meh staff. Hope you all got drunk & laid after
i liked the part where they sold stuff and i bought stuff.
solid 7.142857 out of 10. (because @lichme had to be unconventional and give 5/7)
@carl669 The 5/7 is a meme that started up via a Fight Club discussion that was shared on Reddit:
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/57
@Bogie there’s no possible way i can keep up with all this. i’m sticking with 7.142857
@Bogie Haha, glad somebody understiod the reference
@lichme eh… likely at least 16 others understood but felt no need to reply.
@baqui63 Like me. Dammit! Now I replied.
I think this was a lot of fun overall, and not too overwhelming with the hour long breaks so we could sleep. As long as it’s kept as a special once/twice a year thing I’d look forward to it. Well done Meh!
Also the VMP only hour was a fantastic idea! Makes it that much more worth keeping VMP.
I wish I’d known about it in time to shop. I found out about it quite late and it seemed the site was gridlocked, there was one item with 00.0 in the timer that didn’t change in the several times I looked so I concluded it was over. I’ve been having the “To VMP or Not To VMP” internal debate for a while now. It would have been nice to have silenced my thrifty inner voice with a few VMP justifying purchases.
@moondrake I found that the timer showed 00.00 until the site finally loaded, so if the site was slow or your service was slow, it may not have actually updated. Someone also mentioned the timer was linked to the clock of the device. So I found my phone was a second slower than my pc!
@mikibell More likely your PC was a second faster than your phone.