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

PhilNailerson

This must be the first competition I've ever seen, which actually advocates going into the source code. Usually, it's the thing that gets abused on website competitions...

Mupette

too busy son home from hospital, taking huband to hospital and work to of had a chance to play

littlemissbossy

Well done to all the winners this morning, I spent a mad 45 mins or so flying round the website, I hadn't realised how much info there is on this site.

ETA: Surely it was just a bit of fun with a chance of a prize thrown in, or am I missing something!

badlass

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. 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.

See bold...you suggest we are on a level playing field and that you would not do anything to disadvantage anyone...next paragraph totally contradicts this ethos.

Source code is NOT something most people would know if they found it in their soup never mind find Santa in.

Shame on you MSE :-(

Lx

MissMonkeyMoo

MSE forum manager, that's rubbish and you know it. I'm happy for all the winners and I am not trying to take anything away from them, but the idea was to find an image of Santa as shown in your example. To say that you have used this mechanism before as a way of justifying your actions is completely irrelevant - you didn't explain the competition fairly or give everyone an equal chance. Not many people would know how to look at the source code, so you can't blame people for being peeved off for this totally misleading competition.

senileturtle

grant1wish wrote: »

I doubt that.....

I personally think it was brilliant to hid it in the source code, and very impressive that someone looked there to find it.

I have a good idea, lets complain about a competition that is free to enter, where £1100 is given away and that was a bit of fun. That is sure to make them never do it again.

Merry Christmas

I'm sure your tune would be different had you not won.

grant1wish

Absolutely hilarious. Please don't judge me. Or try to presume how I would feel if I had not won.

I entered a similar comp before when mse. Hid wallets. I didn't win, but also didn't then come on the site complaining that I wasn't good enough to find one.

It is a real shame that the spirit of the competition has been completely lost, unlike santa who was found. I hope mse are not put off running similar comps in the future.

Merry Christmas.

grant1wish

UKIkarus wrote: »

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

That is some serious effort. I just had my pc and was sneakily doing it at work.

davethorp

grant1wish wrote: »

I didn't win, but also didn't then come on the site complaining that I wasn't good enough to find one

Yes because that's why people are complaining. It's not because there were reindeers appearing on pages people had been to previously where there weren't reindeers on the previous visit or a santa image that wasn't even there!

I personally would have zero problem with not having won anything if the competition had been administered in a fair manner. It wasn't! End of! And I like many others expected better of Mr Lewis and MSE

grant1wish

So if it wasn't administered fairly, what advantage did I or any other winner have? Surely every single entrant was equal.