Best way to recieve item drops?

I've heard idling was a great way, but I've also heard Valve made some changes to the drop system that made idling useless. Any other ways?

Why don't you try idling? Idling isn't useless. All Valve did was put a cap on the amount of items you can get per week. If you haven't gotten any/much items last week the amount of items roll over to the next week. I do not know the exact formula for this.

Another thing you can is actually play the game. Personally, I just idle as I do not have much time to play. It's pretty much the same thing.

You don't even have to do it in a server. Open up the console and type

sv_pure 2
map achievement_idle (or w/e idle maps you have downloaded. you may need to join an idle server)

Then just alt-tab and enjoy free items. There's better memory efficient ways to do it but I'm not going to get into that. TF2 alt-tabbed shouldn't be too hard on your PC, as graphics and stuff won't be loaded until you get back into it. And that's why source games fucking hate alt-tabs.

Another thing you can do to recieve SOME item drops instantly is by going to an achievement server and unlocking all milestones. These will give you all the unlockable items.