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Quick Contest Clarification

Something that seems to come up now and again, so I’ll reiterate it and hope that helps.

We accept one entry per day per contest from a single e-mail address and/or household and/or street address.

Let me break that down for you.

“one entry per day.” That means Contest A you can enter once a day, Contest B you can enter once that same day, Contest C you can enter once that same day and so on and so on world without end chunky peanut butter hallelujah. What that does not mean is you have to pick between Contest A, B or C and only enter one of them a day. What that does not mean as well is you can enter Contest A twenty-six times in one day. If you want to go down through the Contests category and enter each and every open contest once that same day, then please, be my guest.

“from a single e-mail address and/or household and/or street address.” This means if you, your wife, your daughter, your son, and your parakeet want to enter, that’s fine–as long as they don’t live with you and don’t share an e-mail address. If you all live in different houses and have different e-mail addresses, enter like crazy (though not so crazy you forget the “once a day” business).

Now…why do we do this? We do this because it strikes a balance between what we want and what you want. What you want is obviously to win something, and you more than likely would like a fair shot at doing so. What we want is obviously website traffic. If we were total bastards, we would just let people run rampant and enter all the time, whenever and wherever. That might be good for traffic, but that would suck for you people who actually have lives and don’t want to sit around all day refreshing and re-entering a contest. We are only partial bastards, so we limit everybody to one entry a day. That way the hardcore who show up everyday are rewarded by being allowed more entries in the prize sombrero, and you less hardcore lot still have a decent shot.

The other piece of this is we want to prevent some house that has fifteen people living in it from entering the contest and “gaming” the system. Every street address and/or household (since you might have more than one household living at a single street address) gets one shot a day. We think that’s fair. And the whole you/mom/dad/daughter/son/parakeet scenario? Seriously, we get entries like that. We get entries from people who think changing up the address just a little bit will throw us off. We get entries from people who just don’t pay attention to the rules and/or think we’re stupid. And I’m not having it.

So people who don’t follow the rules get their entries thrown out. It’s that simple. They don’t get put on a blacklist, they don’t get banned forever–again, we’re partial bastards. Anybody wants to start playing by the rules, whatever the reason they weren’t before, they’re welcome to come and party with us. But this is our party, after all. And we’re trying everything we can to make it good for the majority of our guests. And I think for the most part, we’re succeeding. Hope we are, anyway.

Anyway. I wanted to just try and clarify that again if there were any questions. If you do have questions, you can always comment here and/or e-mail me directly. You can reach me at widgett a t need coffee dot com. As always, thanks for hammering our site for our contests. If you do frequent the site for contests, remember that we have lots of other stuff here too. And I will say this: the more traffic we get, the more exposure we get, the more people want to give us bigger and better prizes. And you know we like to share the goodies. Rising tide raises all boats, so to speak. Thanks again, folks.

11 comments

  • Well posted! This should clarify everything :-) I like to come enter the contests everyday but I do find the rest of the site interesting also. Keep up the good work!

  • That’s what I told my daughter! But she wants to enter only the dvds she’d like to win and she said I should enter the ones I want to win, which are different than hers, but we live in the same household. So I need to tell her we both can’t enter, even though it’s on different dvds. Thanks for the great site!

  • Jay: Hold up there, amigo. If you guys are entering DIFFERENT contests, then you CAN. If you’re both entering the SAME contest then it’s a problem. You and fifteen other people in the same house as you can enter contests all day as long as they’re DIFFERENT CONTESTS. If all SIXTEEN of you want to enter THE SAME CONTEST then you’ve got a problem. To put it another way, if your daughter wants to enter contests A, B and C and you want to enter D, E and F, then have at it.

    Let me know if that’s clear. And thanks for coming to hang out with us.

  • I have two quick questions for you…
    1. How often can you win and
    2. How often do you update the winners list?

  • Hi Heather…thanks for your questions. Two quick answers for you:

    1. You can win as often as we draw your name at random from the prize sombrero. You just can’t win twice for the same contest. Because that would just be tacky.
    2. We throw winners lists online as quick as we’re able to. If you subscribe to our feed, you’ll see the lists when they go live. (And that’s not a sneaky way to get you to subscribe to the RSS feed, it’s just the best way to see what’s what without having to check the site all the time.)

    Let me know if that helps. Thanks again.

  • Hi, thanks for the clarification, I was wondering about the “how often can you win” thing. :) Another question I have:

    How do you define a “day”? Is it midnight-to-midnight? If so, what time zone are you in? I normally start entering contests after midnight (after the kids go to bed, LOL) Eastern time, but sometimes I start early. I like to start *over* again at midnight but I don’t want to have my entries tossed if, say, you’re on Pacific time. Or is your definition of “day” – “every 24 hours”?

    While I’m here, another Q: if I goof and enter a contest twice in one “day”, does that eliminate just those two entries, just one of them, or every entry I’ve ever made for that contest?

    Thanks for further clarification! :) I appreciate ya! Needcoffee is my favorite sweeps site, and I must say makes me want more coffee…

  • Nicole: Thanks for your question. From the Official Rules page: “For the purposes of this contest, a day is defined as the 24-hour period from midnight to midnight, Eastern Standard Time.” And yes, if you enter twice in a day, your entries for that contest are thrown out. I understand people make goofs, but we do that to make sure everybody’s on the same playing field since the method we use to pick winners doesn’t know if you’re trying to game the system or not.

    And I’m glad you like the sweeps here. Tell 99 of your closest friends!

  • To continue on Nicoles line of thinking…..if I entered a contest at 1am on Thursday do I have to wait until 1am on Friday to enter or can I enter at 12:30am on Friday? I like to enter like that too Nicole, when I have “me” time.

  • The 1am on Thursday is between a separate midnight to midnight period as the 12:30am on Friday. So no, you do not have to wait until a full 24 hour period after your first entry. Because that would be mental to have to keep up with.