| So the rules as published didn't apply to all of us?
At the risk of sounding like a sore loser (really, I'm not), I'll say: there are many aspects of this "contest" that appear more than a little suspicious. Among them:
1) A moderator won
2) The winning entry clearly did not meet the stated contest criteria (submitted between 8/1 and 8/31).
3) The rules were changed on ~9/1 to extend the deadline from 8/31 to 9/30. (This was frustrating for those of us who made an effort to complete our submissions before the 8/31 deadline and get our post-count up to 15 by 8/31.)
4) Today we learn that a special exception was made to the rules to allow a moderator's article into the contest even though it wasn't submitted between 8/1 and 9/30. AFAIK, this special exception was not disclosed until after the contest was over.
5) The submitted date on the winning article was recently changed from 7/23 to 8/1. It looks like someone is trying to make it look like the article was submitted within the stated contest period, when in fact it wasn't. Hmmmmm...
6) The "winner" was only announced on this forum after I started a thread about it. Why wasn't a winner announced on 10/1 in the announcements forum? Why weren't qualified entrants notified of the results via email, PM or a message on this forum? The only reason I can think of is that the contest was such a flop that there was no intention of naming a winner at all.
Smells a little fishy to me...
I honestly don't mind not winning a fair contest. I wouldn't have as much of a complaint if Gyutae's "Guide to Buying..." had won. The whole moderator winning thing would still look suspicious but at least that article was submitted within the stated time period.
Had I known that the rules didn't matter, I wouldn't have bothered submitting anything.  |