Don’t forget SF free day is on Wednesday God’s willing!
@ kurtnelle
Promises to be worse for my productivity than a Woot-off. :o
So, I’m a newb to Free Day. Do you just hit up the web site and keep hitting F5 all day?
How do you know when/if you’ve won?
They do it different every year. No one will no for sure until the day of but one thing you can bet on is that it will be almost impossible to access their site throughout the day. Don’t set your hopes high and you might have some fun. I’ve yet to get anything… 
I’ve tried unsuccessfully for two years to get near the contest page. I did manage to login once, but that flash of possibility was quickly doused with more timeouts. It is certainly a great way to test their servers. They probably loose some insane amount of money every minute a node of their site servers is down the other 364 days of the year, so the prize money is well worth the load test data they get in return. Marketing it they way they do is pure genius.
this year, will be my first that I definitely want to participate in. When you consider what 100K users trying to get 2K prizes there is a 2% chance that you’ll win something if you try. Otherwise there is a 0% chance if you don’t try 
If anyone over here wins we’d love to know about it.
My current wish list on SparkFun is around $500 atm… getting $100 off would really be appreciated, especially since it won’t count on the 20% sales tax that I’ll also have to pay when importing stuff to France. So the $100 coupon would actually be worth $120 to me
It sounds like it will be a little easier this year. The first year you had to actually put $100 of stuff in your shopping cart and checkout. The first $100 was free. After about an hour I was able to get stuff in my cart but was never able to checkout before the money was all gone.
This year they say they are giving away $100 vouchers that can be used later and that there will be something to prove you’re not a bot. So, I’m thinking there may be some sort of game you have to play.
Last year I was too busy with work to play, but if it’s going to have a 7 hour window then I’ll be able to play after work
i tried this the first year they did it. I figured that that i would be sneaky by opening multiple pages of the products i wanted all ready to click add to cart and checkout. But 2-3 minutes before it kicked off they re-booted there servers and the site went down. when it came back up i had no bandwidth from them to get anywhere. Personally i think there were to many people like me and my trick out there and they saw this and dumped everyone’s cart and open browsers. Common, who has to reboot several servers 2-3 minted before the big show 
Last year I found out that it was fairly impossible to even load the page, not to mention the product pages or checkout.
I might let this one pass this year
Of course they are out of the Panda and Domino, DAMIT!
@ jdal - I guess great minds (most people that shop at SF…) think alike. I did the same thing!
Lol, sparkfun ain’t easy.
Can someone tell me how we can win credits? What we need to do? Only refresh first page and when we win we get popup?
hahahahahahah countdown hit zero. Site crashed now there is a surprise.
All I got after trying to login:
403 Forbidden
nginx
Has anyone got past the Captcha?