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Contest and Giveaway Guidelines

Posted on Saturday, at • 261 views

Please pardon the gaps...

The site is in mid-migration now (manual migration of over 7,000 entries, so there's a lot to be done.) The entry stubs are created for older content, but for the most part, the actual content isn't there quite yet. I am working on it. Unfortunately I have no ETA. But feel free to link to any page! When the content does get populated, the URL will stay the same.

Contest and Giveaway Guidelines

There has been much debate over how to keep contests and giveaways closed to opportunists (such as freebie forums that report information about contests, so that those forum members can then go sign up and try to get as many freebies as possible), but open to genuine site followers and regular visitors. There's not too many ways that it can be easily accomplished - and if you're hosted in Blogger, you may have fewer options. But I have easy ways to get some additional information, and I'm making use of it.

To be eligible for any future contest or giveaway at Sparklecrack Central, you have to have done a few things:

  1. you must be a registered member. It costs nothing, I do not resell the information, and I send out "newsletters" four times a year, so you won't be spammed, or have your inbox flooded with newsletters that you may not want to receive.
  2. you must comment - while logged in - at any point in the 30 days before the contest begins.
  3. you must add a rating at any point in the 30 days before the contest begins.

There may be additional requirements for individual contests or giveaways - but that's the minimum for all of them, right above.

Only logged-in members can leave ratings, and I can see the date, member name, and email address of anyone who leaves a rating - so that's real easy for me to verify eligibility. I can also look at the comment database and sort by member ID - and see the comment date - so again, real easy for me to verify. I'm able to do this because I have tools that allow me to easily see and sort the various databases, and because the ratings plugin lets me view the ratings information right in the control panel.

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