(Failed) Dirty trick to get more pageviews

This is probably my most "meta" Instructable to date. It's not anything particularly useful, just an idea that occurred to me while I was browsing around and musing on the stuff people do to get you to, for instance, click on their videos on YouTube. Thankfully Instructables doesn't have much of this sort of filthy trickery, but this is a quick peek into what the site might look like if we did.

---

UPDATE

Literally minutes after I finished writing this Instructable, probably no more than half an hour after I published "How to make cereal", I received a PM from a member of staff, telling me that it had been unpublished due to my abuse of the featured stripe and would only be republished once I had removed it.

If you do this for real your Instructable WILL be unpublished and you will probably not make any friends among the moderators. I did this so you don't have to. Please do not attempt to recreate this stunt.

Step 1 Write an Instructable

Exactly what it says on the tin. I wrote "How to make cereal" in a few minutes to demonstrate this on. No great shakes, but that's the point- this doesn't depend on you having any actual content besides a couple of images.

Comments

[geodez]

Wouldn't it be ironic if this was featured?

[Saturn V]

Yes. Yes it would.

[geodez]

Yes.

[The Nomlack]

yes no again!!!!!!!??

[geodez]

Yes.

[Saturn V]

By papercraft, you'd better not mean Origami!

[Kryptonite]

Ha ha, kind of informative I must admit!

[DJ Radio]

Hey PKM, Do you think this would be OK to do if the ible was already featured for real, at one point? I dont think it would be abusing the stripe since it already has it for real.

[DJ Radio]

do I see some of rainbow_han's ibles in the pictures? lol.

[knex_mepalm]

this actually made me want to see his cerreal thingy, lol

[12V]

why not have a slight white border so you have space to extend the banner.

[Yerboogieman]

Have you noticed the Pro tag on the "Pro" instructables lately? lol

[ReCreate]

*evil grin goes here*

[hintss]

You're not pro?

[ReCreate]

no?...

[Yerboogieman]

They changed it, it goes before the name now... I did think you were a "Pro" for a while though.

[ReCreate]

you did?

[Kryptonite]

Looks pixelated, to me.

[ReCreate]

Pixelated? no XD, its just the crappy jpeg converter, converts the image at the lowest possible quality...

[Chromatica]

i did

[ReCreate]

XD well my avatar does not mean that kind of pro, I may get smart and make an avatar with it just next to the name though XD

[Chromatica]

I wish that animated gifs would show on comment boards then I would use one

[ReCreate]

Yeah, But they don't, The Software converts it to a low quality j-peg and displays the first frame of the gif...

[Doctor Who]

nice now to make a winner one ............

[PKM]

I decided to stay away from the "Winner" one because presumably people would wonder which contest you won, and be more likely to uncover the cynical deception. I did think about going OTT and stacking all of the stripes on one thumbnail...

[hintss]

good point

[crestind]

Nice! It's a great blackhat type idea.

[hintss]

hacker likey

[ReCreate]

there is a much simpler way of doing this, when you find the i'ble on the recent list, you simply click the image and drag it to your desktop, saving it to you're HDD, now you open it up in paint, and you paste the featured banner, by itself, aka featured.gif...its here somewhere...

[ewilhelm]

Haha, very nice. I've add the "Instructables hacks" keyword to this. I appreciate your effort, and I agree it's an interesting thought experiment. However, even though an Instructable like this wouldn't appear on the homepage or in the featured RSS feed, the "featured" banner helps causal Instructables users find great content, so we can't let people do this. If you're talented enough to do the image hacking, I bet you could probably make a feature-worthy Instructable.

[ReCreate]

What If we Change the Writing on there like "Fresh" Or "Updated" Is it just that it can not have the Word Featured there?

[PKM]

Well I guess you wouldn't be technically imitating the featured banner, so you probably wouldn't seriously mislead people into thinking your Instructable had been featured when it hadn't, but it would devalue the actual featured stripe because the point of it is to make your Instructable stand out. I suppose you could contrive your intro image so that it had a pale diagonal stripe on the top left hand corner, which could be a fun "comedy crowbar" exercise, but deliberately adding imitation stripes to your thumbnails is not a great idea because you're just gaming the system.

[ReCreate]

Ah...Ok?

[Yerboogieman]

What about when the instructables staff hate you?

[wenpherd]

What about when the instructables staff hate you?

[ewilhelm]

There are non-staff users who can feature content.

[Yerboogieman]

...So is true you guys dis-like me strongly? Also Kiteman said some of my instructables are harder to understand than others.

[wenpherd]

...So is true you guys dis-like me strongly? Also Kiteman said some of my instructables are harder to understand than others.

[Yerboogieman]

He said the same to me....

[wenpherd]

He said the same to me....