1000th Commentor Contest Rules
Every month this blog tried to reach one thousand comments. Whoever left the thousandth one won a gift certificate. That was the whole idea, and it did more to shape this place than anything I ever wrote.
Of course, there had to be a few rules.
The rules
- All monthly comment winners are entered into a random number generator in monthly order, and a winner is drawn from those for the yearly prize.
- A commenter must have a valid website or blog that can be verified, and must have made at least ten comments here. If the thousandth comment is made by somebody who hasn’t reached ten, the next person in line who has will be acknowledged and given the prize instead. I don’t mean to be rude — well, maybe I do — but I want to have fun with the regular participants of this blog. It’s my way of thanking them. And believe me, if I see ten comments from somebody I don’t know that just say “I’m here for the contest” or words to that effect, those comments are getting deleted and I’m moving on. It’s sad that you have to spell this kind of thing out when all you want to do is have fun with the folks who come here for the company and not for a prize.
- Void where prohibited or taxed. The winner is responsible for any taxes or fees that come with winning.
- By taking part, you agree that I can quote your comment in a future post, and mention your username or first name, your avatar, and your blog or website by name.
- The monthly and yearly winners have twenty-four hours from the time of the post to get in touch so we can sort out the particulars.
- The winner chooses from a short list of gift certificates. If none of them work for you, I’m flexible — no comment from the peanut gallery on that last statement, either, do you hear — and we can work something else out. But I’d like to keep it to the list if possible.
- If we don’t hit a thousand comments in a given month, oh well. We move on to the next month and start again. There is no carry-over of the previous month’s prize.
- This contest can be cancelled and the rules changed at any time I see fit, without notice.
The monthly prize was a small gift certificate. The yearly one was a slightly larger gift certificate. Neither was worth entering for on its own, which was precisely the design.
What the contest was really for
Rule 2 is the interesting one, and it is the reason the contest worked at all. The ten-comment qualification meant the prize could only ever go to somebody who was already part of the place. It excluded, by construction, the entire category of person who arrives, drops ten identical comments, and leaves. What was left was a monthly thank-you to the thirty or forty people who genuinely turned up.
The side effect was a monthly rhythm. There would be a post announcing the winner, another post around the middle of the month noting how the count was going, and a running tally in the sidebar. The commenters started paying attention to the number, which meant they started paying attention to each other, and by the second half of most months the comment threads had less to do with the posts than with the people in them.
There was a leaderboard in the sidebar too — the “Talkers” widget, which simply ranked everyone by comment count. I have deliberately not restored it. Those were real people’s names, they didn’t put them there to be published fourteen years later, and the point of the leaderboard was never the ranking anyway.
A note on running contests
Rules 3 and 4 look like boilerplate and they are, but they weren’t decorative. Small blog giveaways sit inside real consumer-protection rules about disclosure and about what a promoter may do with an entrant’s words and likeness — the Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement guidance is still the clearest plain-English explanation of where the lines are. The blog’s own disclosure policy covered the rest.
Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou