ENDED! Seek Santa for a chance to win £100 or £200

cm7

For what it's worth some of the pages I had definitely never visited (only ever go directly to the forum) but the hard refresh brought up the reindeer for me. Very strange, have to assume that the site caches the sidebar/background over the entire site. If that's the case you were at a disadvantage if you visited the site before 11am today.

Former_MSE_Forum_Manager

Hi Folks,

Sorry to hear some of you experienced issues when looking for the images. The most likely cause is browser caching issues, I'm informed by the techies. We would never release images to one set of users and not another, or do anything else to give any users a competitive advantage.

Regarding the "source code" Santa. We've actually used this exact mechanism in the past on previous similar hunts - the intention is to make the £200 much more tricky to find as it's for more money. You were asked to look for a placed image and those who managed to find it had found a placed image on a specific URL. it is a challenge- but that was the idea.

As grant1wish says, it's very impressive people did find it. It's also worth adding that all this happened in 54 minutes, so it was clearly very do-able, if more cryptic. The speed our users find these hidden images at is staggering!

We appreciate some people will still be frustrated but we've just given away £1100, inside 1 hour, to 10 lucky users who will hopefully be able to use their share for something nice.

If you weren't lucky this time, thanks for playing anyways and I wish you a very nice festive period.

davethorp

MSE_Forum_Manager wrote: »

The most likely cause is browser caching issues

Again in two different browsers? One of which had never visited MSE prior to today???

Doesn't seem likely to me

UKIkarus

2 different browsers on 2 different dedicated lines with 2 different ip addresses both of which were cleared of cache before loading and hard reset every time with Ctrl +F5 and shift+ F5 to be safe.

Also with dev tools/firebug open on chrome/firefox to disable caching.

I am an IT Technician myself and I am at a loss

davethorp

Well there goes the most likely cause. Have TPTB got anything else or are they finally going to admit the competition was not administered fairly

clairebear1328

Here's what to look for

The images in this post don't count - all the winning images will contain a code and the name of the reindeer.



Unless i'm mistaken it says to look for the image not a hidden line of text to find the image. I checked that page by 11.05 If the rules stated that you needed to do more than just find the image I would have read the text. And could of very well won, but as the terms and condition said to look for the image I did.

I agree it did make the challenge last longer but the playing field wasn't fair and the person that located him only found him after the clue and knew he was there somewhere. First time I have ever been disappointed with MSE

pretzelnut

clairebear1328 wrote: »

Here's what to look for

The images in this post don't count - all the winning images will contain a code and the name of the reindeer.



Unless i'm mistaken it says to look for the image not a hidden line of text to find the image. I checked that page by 11.05 If the rules stated that you needed to do more than just find the image I would have read the text. And could of very well won, but as the terms and condition said to look for the image I did.

I agree it did make the challenge last longer but the playing field wasn't fair and the person that located him only found him after the clue and knew he was there somewhere. First time I have ever been disappointed with MSE

I completely agree with you, I was looking for a VISUAL santa, by quickly scanning pages. I have no idea what source code is and I imagine a lot of others don't either.

Congrats to the winner, Just means I won't bother next time as MSE didn't play by their own rules, except the ''Our decision is final'' bit.

bestpud

Isn't this misleading members - the kind of behaviour MSE is against?

clauski

The biggest irony I find is that a site that helps make things easier for the average member of the public and does a great job of simplifying things into easy to understand terms goes and holds a competition which means you have to have IT skills. Would most people know about caches, hard refresh, source code etc? No! Suitable for a tech-based site maybe, but not for the MSE Xmas comp people had been looking forward to for days! Chances are neither I nor anyone else who is disappointed would have found the Santa anyway so it's no great loss but in the scheme of running competitions and making them fair (which is often a focus of the comps forum), this wasn't the best example!!

Well done to everyone who won and like I said earlier get onto the competitions forum where many users do a fantastic job of sharing more chances to win across the internet!

fermi

MSE_Forum_Manager wrote: »

Hi Folks,

Sorry to hear some of you experienced issues when looking for the images. The most likely cause is browser caching issues, I'm informed by the techies. .

Not here, as no previous cache existed.

Not that fussed, just slightly disappointed.