The Sneaky Gate ✣ is a secret entrance to Mechanicsburg. Jenka and da Boyz elect to bring Gil in through this gate after he calls down the lightning ✣ to defeat the Knights of Jove, even though it violates the agreement (presumably with Klaus) that the Jägers would not enter the city until a Heterodyne was in residence.
To Gil, the gate seems to appear out of nowhere, and the Jägers say that it will disappear just as completely in such a way that many readers have inferred that the Gate actually travels around. Given the nature of Castle Heterodyne, this is not impossible.
Fan definition[]
As this wiki intends to be useful to all GG fans, but especially to those who wish to engage in forensics concerning the canon, absolutely do not post any information on the wiki from unreleased pages. It will be "rolled back" here as well, and may lead to a user being banned. See the spoiler policy for more information on when you can post about new pages.
The "Sneaky Gate" has come to be the codename for a way to access Girl Genius strips before the official release date, which involves some monkeying around with the dates on images (viewing an image on an existing page and changing the URL to specify a future date). While rumor says that the Foglios don't mind if people do this, it's not something we wish to officially advocate.
The process is simple: copy the URL address of a strip's picture in your browser's address bar, and you can clearly see that the name is of the form ggmainYYYYMMDD.jpg. Merely modify the date to that of the day you want to access in advance, and if the file has already been uploaded, it will load. (Double-page spreads sometimes are labeled ggmainYYYYMMDDa.jpg, the Sneaky Gate is then to change it to ggmainYYYYMMDDb.jpg.)
Usually, the wait between the moment the file is uploaded and the moment the comic is officially online is less than four hours, so it's a bit pointless, but there are those few rare times when strips are uploaded days in advance. However, the stratagem to avoid a long wait, such as over a weekend, backfires when the fan then discovers that now they will have to wait even longer to get new content.
Furthermore, please note that the moderators of the Yahoo! mailing list consider the posting of advance spoilers to be verboten. Any such post will be deleted from the archive and you will have your posts moderated, which will seriously curtail your ability to participate (even with innocent messages). You will also lose your Moxana Points. The LiveJournal fan community (dormant, migrated to Dreamwidth) tends to be more tolerant of advance posts (at least the ones that are only a few hours ahead), so long as the post is contained behind an lj-cut tag and proper warning is given.
Rare[]
As of 2017 operational Sneaky Gates had not been observed for some time. This is likely due to new posting automation used by the Professors, possibly implemented around the time they hired a business manager in 2013. Since then the Sneaky Gates has been operational occasionally, sometimes when Kaja Foglio is traveling.
Checking for an Open Sneaky Gate with Mad Science![]
An experimental web page has been created to check for Girl Genius comic web page images uploaded in advance. Use at your own risk, since it may load an old Girl Genius page image into your browser cache for the URL of a page for a future date. If this happens, you won't be able to see the actual page image for that date until you clear or force refresh your browser cache. This is more of an inconvenience than anything else, but it can get annoying. The same problem can occur for a single page with the manual sneaky gate method described above, but this web page automates the process, checking for pre-loaded page images for the next five days, potentially multiplying the inconvenience.
For more information about this tool and an associated Girl Genius browser, see Tools for reading Girl Genius.