Recruitment (AKA: getting TGRR to shut the fuck up by amusing him w fresh meat)

[navkat]

There are a shitton of O:MF ideas we've collected over the years that have the defacto effect of drawing noobs to the site. "WTF IS THIS SHIT?" I imagine them saying. "Principia Discordia? I'm gonna look them up."

Then, they get here and we anihilate them with pettiness, in-fighting, exclusivity and one-upmanship. We think we can't use 'em because they aren't Mensa members or they don't Get It^tm.

Listen: do you know what one has to score on the ASVAB to get into the US Army?

37.

Notable: Banksy, Stephen Fairey. These people have like, money and followers n shit. André the Giant has a career. It used to be called "stupid punks shitting up the street with garbage" and now it's called art. If you can get people to part with money with your self-indulgent bullshit, you can certainly get them to respond with righteous, self-indulgent bulshit of their own. Come on; people are still getting off on Flash Mobs for coca cola and sprite and then taking the train to #OWS sit-ins with nary a thought to irony. We should be making triple six-fig salaries in marketing...if we weren't so fucking socially inept.

My ideas:
1. let's recycle, re-examine, reuse all the ideas-old and new-with a new emphasis on getting motherfuckers here.
2. Branding, people. Logos. HIMEOBS did this fantastically. Let's make a fuckton of Brands that all lad back to the same place: here. The Government does this. The banks do this. Whether you are For^tm or Against^tm, you are ultimately a customer of the same company.
3. Teasers. Make this shit look all shadowy and mysterious. Create the illusion of exclusivity and be inclusive instead of the other way 'round. We've had it ass-backward, spaggots.
Remember how you felt when The Matrix came out? "A SECRET, UNDERGROUND WORLD OF ILLUMINATED MEMBERS?!?" Remember when Trent Reznor started with all that Year Zero bullshit and we thought it was gonna be something awesome? Remember how you felt when you found the "hidden tracks" at the end of the Broken EP and the Tool albums? Hell, half the appeal of the Rave Scene^tm was the covert nature and map points.

Look at this: http://www.symbiosispresents.com/

Dude, it's a fucking party, man. Just a fucking party...with a countdown and a mailing list. And good branding. Pepsi will probably be there. Hell, I'd blow Michelle Bachman if I thought drinking her spooge would take me on a secret journey through Wondernew.

Do that shit up right and they'll be lining up to cram fistsful of red pills into their faceholes before you can utter the words "anal leakage."

4. This forum is massive and a lot to read and has an emphasis on "you are a retard and no one wants you here" messages. Being massive is great when it's all labyrinthine and shit. Maybe multiple levels of read permissons? Some more welcoming noob threads that are like "Congratulations, you are now one of the Awakened" instead of "It's just the internet, motherfucker?" They think there's a secret forum? MAKE TEN SECRET FORUMS and elude to each one of them with the last. The Truth is: "it's just the internet, motherfucker," but by the time they actually figure that out, we'll have filtered out the bored, amused ourselves with the dumb and already plunged our diseased claws deep into the minds of th creative remainder. Maybe we'll actually become the club we're presenting. Hey, you believe your own bullshit for long enough, it might actually become reality.

Let's bust out a new coat of paint and some drapes for those Black Iron Prison cells, comrades! I wanna see some "pop!"

Or kill Roger.

[navkat]

5. Easter eggs. The text "tl;dr" should trigger a script that replaces it with "I am lazy and unimaginitive."

And when I said Kill Roger, I meant that literally. Do you know how many tickets we could sell? And we could sweeten the deal by having Nigel raffle off his testicles at the end of the show.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I do not want to think about how many dowsing rods I would need to find Roger's testicles in all that Newfie pelt, and on top of that once you consider the complications of raffling them off while he's still attached to them, and what kind of repercussions that would generate with his wife... it seems highly unwise, really. As for killing Roger, if I recall we once hated him all up, and as you can see, he turned out to be immortal.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

5. Easter eggs. The text "tl;dr" should trigger a script that replaces it with "I am lazy and unimaginitive."

And when I said Kill Roger, I meant that literally. Do you know how many tickets we could sell? And we could sweeten the deal by having Nigel raffle off his testicles at the end of the show.

I think once I typed :somethinginbetweencolons: and to my surprise, it was an emote that wasn't even on the list. I thought that was awesome.

[Faust]

I was thinking of a recruitment drive myself.

The fastest and easiest way to get people in is people you know. Invite them, the next is a postergasm and pamphletting.
There are a lot of things that we could do, admittedly a lot of it has been down to performance issues, myself and trip have been doing what we can and it seems to be improving.

Another is identifying if a forum is still the best method of communication, all the forums I have been on in the last few years have started dwindling compared to feed sites.

Then there is always, whenever we post something cool: DIGG/STUMBLE/REDDIT that shit. How will our public know how great we are unless we tell them.

[Placid Dingo]

Having cool ideas in this area vut the phone I use doesn't type very well ever since I dropped it in a cup of tea, so ill be back.

[Reginald Ret]

5. Easter eggs. The text "tl;dr" should trigger a script that replaces it with "I am lazy and unimaginitive."

Good idea, though i'd replace "tl;dr" by "tl;dr because I am lazy and should come back when I am more motivated." for clarity.

[Cramulus]

I was thinking of a recruitment drive myself.

The fastest and easiest way to get people in is people you know. Invite them, the next is a postergasm and pamphletting.
There are a lot of things that we could do, admittedly a lot of it has been down to performance issues, myself and trip have been doing what we can and it seems to be improving.

Another is identifying if a forum is still the best method of communication, all the forums I have been on in the last few years have started dwindling compared to feed sites.

Then there is always, whenever we post something cool: DIGG/STUMBLE/REDDIT that shit. How will our public know how great we are unless we tell them.

things that would be helpful towards this end:

buttons for "share on facebook", "post this to http://www.reddit.com/r/discordia", blog this, etc

Sometimes I wish there was a "view single post" mode, because I want to link somebody to an awesome idea, but I don't want them to get distracted by the rest of the garbage in the thread.


Changing mediums can be tough... irreality existed for a long time as a forum, then they became blogs, then they became this custom thing that they invented that wasn't quite blogs and wasn't quite facebook... and you'll note that there's no irreality anymore.

But something like a local social network might be a good idea. Maybe the thing is to integrate it with the forums so that they don't fall by the wayside.

[Cramulus]

I do think that we'll get a lot of fresh meat if we figure out how to operationalize the massive amount of material we have here.

Right now our front page says

For a large resource of Discordian quotes check out the memebomb database.

Our current projects are The Verwirrung Blog, The Choose Your Own Misadventure Wiki, The Golden Apple Seed Missions and The Discordian Radio Station.

which is a bit dated...

there should be a PDF archive -- some way to click on a link on the front page, and get all the postergasm material. Or all the rants.

[Faust]

I do think that we'll get a lot of fresh meat if we figure out how to operationalize the massive amount of material we have here.

Right now our front page says

For a large resource of Discordian quotes check out the memebomb database.

Our current projects are The Verwirrung Blog, The Choose Your Own Misadventure Wiki, The Golden Apple Seed Missions and The Discordian Radio Station.

which is a bit dated...

there should be a PDF archive -- some way to click on a link on the front page, and get all the postergasm material. Or all the rants.

I've got a local copy of everything from OKM up to last summer when I made it. It's just it doesn't look very good because it has the forum layout for the pdf of each page.

I've found mods for viewing a single post and for facebook integration but they are both for smf 2.x, I've been looking at making the big switch soon but it means we would lose a lot of cool shit like gen32, the robots and the snailmode for trolls.

If there's a blurb you would prefer for the frontpage just give me a shout and I'll put it up.

[Cramulus]

This question "How can we turn a forum thread into something an outsider would read?" keeps coming up.

You know what would be really sick?


If we had a button that turned a post into a PDF set on Official Discordian Letterhead, with nice fonts and an artistic frame.

[Faust]

This question "How can we turn a forum thread into something an outsider would read?" keeps coming up.

You know what would be really sick?


If we had a button that turned a post into a PDF set on Official Discordian Letterhead, with nice fonts and an artistic frame.

If you can find me Official Discordian Letterhead I'll make something that does it. I went looking for the letterhead in september and couldn't find it.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I'm supposed to shut up?   

[Don Coyote]

I'm supposed to shut up?   

The resulting explosion caused by the back pressure would no doubt level most of AZ leaving only Tuscon and Phoenix.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

okay