All in all, submissions have gone pretty well. Words cannot fully express the excitement (its like Christmas!) every month as more great entries are submitted.
Here's a few things folks, and they're going to be more fully adhered to.
1. Please include your forum name, prominently in the beginning of your email text. Don't come back and say it was the file name of your pictures, or your email address, or it was submitted several contests back. Different folks are running the contest all the time, they're volunteers, and they do not do research projects. If you don't give your forum name, your real name will be used, and frankly, we might be too busy to go back and change it later. No name included? Easy, no contest entry.
2. Please make your email PLAIN TEXT. Because there are more than one person facilitating the entry process, we use the web interface for email. It does not handle html email in many instances. When you see weird line spacing, or missing stuff from your descriptions... that's why. Staff copies and pastes the text. If it doesn't copy well, we're not going to edit it back to plain text. Recent problems included an odd purple text that came up blank on our web interface, and grey text in a weird fond that just would not copy.
3. Submit two (or one), and not more than two photos, AS ATTACHMENTS to the email. Do not embed the photos in html email. If you do that, at best we're jumping through hoops to save the images before transferring them to photobucket. At worst, you included embedded links to protected photo servers that wont let us copy locally. Want to be a real good entrant? Name your images after yourself (forum name), with a 1 or 2 after the name. Example: gom1.jpg
All of this sounds harsh and tyrannical. Its not the intent. Two circumstances are at play: Volunteers that are short on time, and shared interfaces, which must be very simple for it all to work. We copy, we paste. We upload and we download. And we add verbatim what is given to us. So, please have a heart, and comply with the simple things asked for submissions, and in so doing, you'll help staff here to help you have a good contest.
Thanks for your thoughtful consideration! And, keep those great entries rolling in!
Here's a few things folks, and they're going to be more fully adhered to.
1. Please include your forum name, prominently in the beginning of your email text. Don't come back and say it was the file name of your pictures, or your email address, or it was submitted several contests back. Different folks are running the contest all the time, they're volunteers, and they do not do research projects. If you don't give your forum name, your real name will be used, and frankly, we might be too busy to go back and change it later. No name included? Easy, no contest entry.
2. Please make your email PLAIN TEXT. Because there are more than one person facilitating the entry process, we use the web interface for email. It does not handle html email in many instances. When you see weird line spacing, or missing stuff from your descriptions... that's why. Staff copies and pastes the text. If it doesn't copy well, we're not going to edit it back to plain text. Recent problems included an odd purple text that came up blank on our web interface, and grey text in a weird fond that just would not copy.
3. Submit two (or one), and not more than two photos, AS ATTACHMENTS to the email. Do not embed the photos in html email. If you do that, at best we're jumping through hoops to save the images before transferring them to photobucket. At worst, you included embedded links to protected photo servers that wont let us copy locally. Want to be a real good entrant? Name your images after yourself (forum name), with a 1 or 2 after the name. Example: gom1.jpg
All of this sounds harsh and tyrannical. Its not the intent. Two circumstances are at play: Volunteers that are short on time, and shared interfaces, which must be very simple for it all to work. We copy, we paste. We upload and we download. And we add verbatim what is given to us. So, please have a heart, and comply with the simple things asked for submissions, and in so doing, you'll help staff here to help you have a good contest.
Thanks for your thoughtful consideration! And, keep those great entries rolling in!
