I can give a fairly comprehensive explanation of -how- to exploit the save index's sorting system to get stuff up on front page, but I feel like that might be cheating a bit. Knowing how it works precisely doesn't make it all that much easier, though.

Just keeping in mind some basic rules anyway:

1) Stuff only stays up for a week.
I've never been 100% clear whether this is a week from the first instance of something landing on FP, or a week since its actual publishing date, but anything more than a week old simply can't appear on FP at all whether promoted by an operator or not unless they use specific settings.

2) If a save is less than a week old, it can appear on FP if nothing more popular is already on FP.
In other words, if every save on FP has exactly 4 votes, and yours has 4 and does not appear, a single vote will drop the save at a random spot on FP depending on popularity at the moment and other saves' ages.

3) Any save with negative votes will not appear on FP regardless of admin promotion or popularity.
If a save has 30 upvotes and 29 downvotes, two more downvotes will make the save abruptly vanish from FP.

4) The server index has an automatic cooldown for FP versus new save publishings.
eg; one cannot simply republish every minute, maybe a few times a day if not slightly more, if you're going for this.

5) Moderators for the save index are fairly picky, and have very high standards.
Almost anything that looks pretty, demonstrates a rarely-exploited emergent principle of gameplay, or accomplishes some unusual or fantastic feat is likely to stay up on FP without being touched. It doesn't really matter how complicated saves are; Plenty of elaborate electronics get totally ignored in spite of their actual accomplishment, while proton bombs that do really nothing special continue being popular.

Purely artistic work doesn't actually hold much ground otherwise, and if it isn't fantastically lavish, it's likely to get shot down no matter how much time you spend trying to advertise it. Sorry!


From all this you can basically get the picture that if you open all the FP saves in a browser to see how many votes they all have, and bank on republishing something you want up on FP when there's more than a few <5 vote saves at the bottom, -and then- go and bug as many friends as you care to poke at to vote up on the save you've just republished from scratch, you're essentially guaranteed to get it on FP for long enough to get upwards traction and further upvotes for the following week.<br/>
If no one else likes it, it'll still get shot down by the myriad of silly TPT users who feel justified in downvoting it, though <3

Also, yeah, do some tricks and figure out when TPT is most active - probably when American middle-schoolers come back from school. Publish then.

So, basic publicity stunts - get the most eyeballs on your save, appeal to the masses, make something effortlessly "cool" (Something that general TPT users can look at for ~5 seconds and go whoa) and remember to stick to the rules. ^{this has been a public service announcement}