Yeah the G.Skill giveaway also just did that to me.
No amount of refreshing the page fixes it, I get no box to enter my username and link.
Thanks guys. I've got a note out to the community team to fix it. (A different member of the team took care of creating the giveaways for Monday and Tuesday, so learning curve).
If there's some issue or things are just very busy please let the community know. It'd be better to know when to expect the winners to be announced then to keep coming back to check and seeing no results. It's kind of taking the entertainment value out of it.
So this is a bit COA, but officially the terms and conditions are for a drawing by the 23rd. We're trying to keep things moving a bit faster than that, but I can't make any guarantees. Though I've asked the community team if they have any best-guesses on how quickly they'll be able to do this.
Your best bet is to watch your email; that's how we're contacting the winners. The public list in the widget isn't meant to be the primary contact, rather it's a nice perk of the system.
I don't expect to win anything, I don't care if I win anything. But the way this thing is being handled is a slap in the face to people that are actually members here and use this site. That gleam thing is unacceptable and whoever decided to subject the real members here to something like that should be outed, fired and hopefully castrated.
So that one is my decision and my responsibility. That said, I would
really appreciate it if you didn't castrate me...
We use Gleam for a few reasons.
1) It has some great tools for drawing winners and filtering out duplicate or invalid entries, especially those from people who are in other countries and we can't award prizes to. In fact it was really the only way to hold 31 drawings in a sane manner. So no matter what with the items below, we were going to use Gleam anyhow just due to volume.
2) It meant we could do things to encourage users to do things like comment in an article or come over to the forums and register. The forums in particular we want to try to send more people this way, as the forums are a bit tucked away and we want to encourage readers to come here more often. Both to give you guys more people to play with, and because I firmly believe you can't have good tech discussions on social media (or Reddit) most of the time due to the time-sensitive nature of those services. (But I digress...)
3) So that we could send some traffic over to the hardware vendors' social media pages. This is an additional carrot to them to participate in the giveaway. Social media traffic makes their bosses happy, which makes them more likely to send us hardware and/or more of it. This is something I carefully considered, and other than a misconfigured Twitter link yesterday, the only reason I've allowed this is because it didn't require connecting your Twitter account to Gleam. I am painfully aware of all the weird tracking stuff that Facebook and such like to do, which is why we went for the minimal option here that doesn't involve giving other services access to that data.