A satirical guide for the XP hungry
With a bow to the KLF's seminal The Manual - (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way)
Ok, you're a newbie to E2, and you want to increase your XP sharpish. Perhaps you're an incurable XP Whore - who knows. The important thing to remember, if you need points like a junkie needs crack, is that timing is everything
In order to achieve the maximum possible XP harvest out of your carefully crafted, informative and stunningly witty new node, you need to plan its appearance in the New Writeups column, that Nirvana Of Nodevertising, with military precision. (Although given the quality of many military manoeuvres, an alternative metaphor may be called for here)
Firstly, the node title. As every aspiring Godhead knows, the quality of the node title is crucial to its success. It needs to be gramatically correct, interesting or outrageous, funny or intriguing, or, if you just can't manage any of those, simply use the well-known E2 bug to generate a hugely long node title that cannot be ignored.
A good node title combined with an open-ended or provocative writeup will pay for itself manyfold, due to the extra free publicity garnered by follow-up writeups appearing in New Writeups.
I shall not concern myself with the content of your writeup, because that is rather out of the scope of this node and, as Stock, Aitken and Waterman (those svengalis of the throwaway pop product) would say, "give 'em what they want to hear".
/me ducks hailstorm of downvotes
"So far, so much old news", I hear you say. Perhaps. The most crucial phase of your carefully planned noding is the Server Time at which you wave your magic wand and click the Sumbit button.
Firstly, check the New Writeup Churn rate. If someone is currently noding the Complete Works Of Shakespeare at one word per node, or a newbie is committing XP Suicide by noding all his mate's names, your masterpiece will disappear from the NW Column like a rat up an Aquaduct and your writeup will rapidly fade into obscurity. There are ways to recover from this disasterous situation (see appendix), but they are mean, underhand, and the last act of a desperate failure.
Monitor the number of fellow noders (above 40 is generally prime time), and correlate the subject matter of the node against the list below.
Optimum Times To Node Different Subjects (times are in Server Time)
- Pro-American Politics: Most times are good, but avoid between 09:00 and 13:30 weekdays because Europeans are frequently in the majority. (and we have no sense of humour)
- Anti-American Politics: The opposite of above, or whenever DMan's on ;-)
- Eurocentric topics: Between 13:00 and 17:00 weekdays (especially Mondays & Fridays) or 20:00 to 01:00 weekdays, (because we love to read about ourselves)
- Humour: Between 16:30 and 05:00 (avoid Tuesdays and Wednesdays - people are feeling grumpy because it's the middle of the week)
- Factual: 12:00 to 20:00 (people aren't drunk yet)
- Sexual topics: 24/7/365 (duh)
Another tip: Look at the
Other Users column. This is sorted in hierarchy order - if you are anywhere near the top of this list either
- You are a successful, quality noder who has no need for this guide, or
- There are many newbie noders on E2, who have few votes and no Ching!s to distribute, and are of no use to you in your evil plan to NFN.
More evil and cynicism to be added here as it comes to me...
Appendix: Underhanded ways to Nodevertise a badly-timed node
- Simply go on the chatterbox and blatantly Nodevertise your own node. This bores people, and is unlikely to get you any +XP.
- Open a secondary E2 'plugger' account, and use that username to more subtly Nodevertise your own node.
- Use your 'plugger' account to write a new node with an outrageous title, which wildly slanders (and links to) your original node. May be good for sympathy votes.
- Simply soft-link it like crazy to anything and everything that appears in the NW column, in the hope that piggybacking onto a successful node will boost your own flagging fortunes.