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

Madrabbitgirl

I would just like to say well done to all the winners! I must agree that hiding the Santa in the source code was a tad unfair though as it leaves us less computer savvy peeps without a hope but well done to the person that found it.

davethorp

Admin have gone awfully quiet now their "official" explanation for the shenanigans has been debunked

grant1wish

Are we still discussing this?

I don't think 'Admin' have anything to answer. I don't see how the comp could be called unfair because certain people have less computer knowledge than others. Surely every single competition ever run would be suited to certain individuals over others... This one for example was better suited to someone who was not busy at 11am. The Daybreak comps are better suited to someone who has a phone number etc.... Just because Santa was hidden in source code does not make the competition unfair.

When I had a go on this comp, I never thought I would win, and I also didn't realise how serious some people take this kind of thing.

davethorp

Taking the issue of the Santa code to one side, there is still the bigger issue of the reindeers not appearing on the pages for everyone who visited them. Many people visited pages which were eventually revealed to contain codes long before the winners did and the codes were not there!

I assume from the fact you completely glossed over that issue that you concur that the competition was unfair in that respect

grant1wish

I too visited pages that had winning codes, but did not see the codes, but I simply carried on ploughing through the pages. Most codes were actually activated in some way, for example the one I found was only visible once I have used the Outlet tool, and it didn't work first time. I had to query on the word Christmas for it to be revealed.

who_is_the_daddy?

Just to try and put this one to bed a little bit - I hope MSE run this competition again next year. It was really good fun. All it needs is clearer rules.

Unicorns

It was good fun, I'd have a go at another one if they were to run one, but if it needs specifics like can't be done from a tablet or to say you could have these issues whatever caching was!? To be able to sort that before hand would be great, obviously they must not have been aware of the issues, but something to work on/fix for next years comp.

3010

I don't think any clues should have been given for this comp if i'm honest. The closing date for the comp was 26/12. It would have been more fun to keep it going for the week rather than only having it on for 1 hour. Just my opinion though. I would have liked to have seen the reindeer hidden better ( I don't mean in code) for example on pages rather than tools as that is where a large amount were put. I did like how one had been hidden in a thread, which was a good idea as it made it hard to find.

meher

meow :snow_grin

back on topic, where can i find some screenshots please, just to have fun going round looking for them

:xmastree::xmassign:

fordred

Looks like the problem wasn't so much a browser cache issue, but a server issue.

The images were on the images2 server, which is pointing at the Akamai CDN. It would take time for the CDN to propagate and mirror the changes on their network. This would mean that it depended on luck, and who your DNS provider is. Some DNS responses would have sent you to different servers, which didn't have the content pushed to them yet.

However, if you were a geek and looked at the page source code, you would have seen that images were being requested from the images2 server.

Might I suggest that in future, the images are hosted on a single server (like the main website and the forum) and not on a Content Distribution Network.