Update 2019-04-03: All swag prizes have been mailed (via US Postal Service). Those in the US should get them in about a week; unfortunately the postal clerk couldn't give me an estimate on delivery times elsewhere. Please let me know if you think a package has gone missing.
All StoryBundle gift certificates were sent. If you were expecting one and didn't get it, please check your spam folder for email from them. If you still don't see it, please contact me so we can sort it out.
When I proposed our contest focusing on underserved tags I had no idea what kind of response to expect. Would lots of people participate? Would people participate a lot? Would we get good new questions? Would new questions get good answers? Or would people say "yeah, whatever" and mostly ignore it?
You didn't ignore it. Our community did great! I'll get to the winners, but first I want to highlight some things we can all be excited about:
This contest generated 118 qualifying entries from 16 entrants! And there were some more questions that would have qualified, but their authors didn't enter the contest.
Based on casual observation (i.e. I do not have a data query to check this), most of those questions got several good answers.
Five entrants asked their first questions during this contest: April, Spectrosaurus, motosubatsu, Prasad_Joshi, and imatowrite (with an honorable mention to linksassin, whose first question was in February before the contest started). Welcome and thank you for jumping into something new!
In terms of the Generalist badge, we added one more qualifying tag (short-story) and two more tags are close to qualifying -- software needs three more questions and screenwriting needs ten. We're making progress! Many sites do not hit this milestone until well after graduation.
We reached 10 questions per day on March 4 and, aside from a few dips down to 9.9, we've stayed there. The highest QPD I've seen is 11.9.
Have we changed site culture and activity level? Is 10-11 questions per day our new normal? I'm very optimistic that it is, because while this contest has highlighted it, y'all are asking good questions that you need answers to and it's hard to believe that notebooks and pens could be the only motivation! The contest has ended but we have a strong, active community and that's not going to change. Our users make this site better each and every day, and that's awesome.
Winners
First, the honorable mentions -- each of these people asked one question and every question helps build our site:
- Mithrandir
- Spectrosaurus
- motosubatsu
- F1Krazy
- celtschk
- Shokhet
These people entered at least three questions, qualifying for the random draw:
- Karan Desai, 3
- Secespitus, 3
- linksassin, 4
- Prasad_Joshi, 4
- April, 6
- imatowrite, 10
And our top finishers were clustered so closely that I'm going to go ahead and declare four winners. Please congraulate:
- Liquid, 18
- Cyn, 20
- Galastel, 21
- bruglesco, 23
Congratulations to bruglesco who asked 23 qualifying questions, and to Galastel, Cyn, and Liquid who were close behind!
Prizes
Everybody who asked at least three questions (and fills out the form, which I'll get to) gets swag! I know I said it'd be a random draw among those with three questions, but that was mostly a hedge against having more entrants than notebooks. I have enough books, so prizes for all of you!
In addition, I am donating a StoryBundle e-book bundle to each of the top four. StoryBundle produces curated bundles of books, usually but not always fiction, in thematic packs of usually 9-10 books. Each bundle is only available for a few weeks, and they announce new bundles regularly. Every year in the fall they have a bundle of books about writing (in honor of NaNoWriMo). I've been introduced to some great fiction through StoryBundle, and the gift cards never expire so you can keep checking (or get on their email list) until you see one that grabs your fancy. The books are DRM-free and work with all the usual e-reader apps/devices.
To get your prizes: fill out this Google form to tell me where to send them. Now, normally when SE runs contests they send you email using your address on file, instead of putting a link like that out there for the world to see, but I'm just a moderator, not an SE employee, and I do want to be mindful of how I use your private information, and sometimes that email goes astray because the email address you registered back in 2011 doesn't work any more, so... there's the link, and if I see anything suspicious that makes me think somebody is trying to intercept someone else's prize, then I'll use mod-private means to get in touch with you to confirm your submission. But I'm not going to have to do that 'cause we're all honorable people here -- I'm just anticipating and responding to what is technically a flaw in the system, 'k?
Note to StoryBundle winners: to give you your bundles I'll need to give StoryBundle an email address for you. If you don't trust them, feel free to make a different email address just for that purpose -- but I've found them to be quite reasonable and not spammy in the couple years I've been buying stuff from them, for what that's worth.
