Friday, May 4, 2012

What Happened Last Night (and How We're Going to Fix It)

Last night wasn’t fun. We had a little bit of a widget malfunction, so a lot of people had problems signing up for the contest. We’re so, so sorry about what happened. A lot of people still managed to make it in, but because we feel bad that the widget didn’t work like we said it would, we’re opening up one last submission window today at 12:00 noon EDT (or 9:00 a.m. PDT).

The widget will accept 25 more entries (for a total of 200 entries), and these will be the last entries, I promise. If the Internet implodes a minute before noon and only Molly the Mole Person makes it into the contest, well, we’re just going to have to live with it and go with what we’ve got. Of course, I hope the Internet doesn’t implode and 24 more people--in addition to Molly the Mole Person--make it in, but I’m just saying that however things turn out at noon today is how they’ll be.

Here’s the thing, though: THE SUBMISSION WINDOW WILL GO UP AN HOUR EARLY to eliminate the problem* we had last night. You’ll see the widget with the 175 existing entrants at 11:00 a.m. EDT, but you won’t be able to add your name to it until noon. That means that, AT NOON, YOU'LL HAVE TO REFRESH THE PAGE TO BE ABLE TO ADD YOUR NAME TO THE WIDGET. But the widget will be good to go right at noon this time (we hope).

If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below. (I’m starting to sound like a broken record, aren’t I?) Or if you're already sick of us, just take this pretend cookie and our apologies. We feel terrible.

Moral of the story: If at first you don’t succeed, refresh, refresh, refresh!

*The problem we had last night was that, while we were resetting the widget to accept additional entries (you have to activate the widget to reset it, apparently), a few people jumped the gun and started signing up on the first window’s post several minutes before the second window officially opened. So then we had to delete those early entries and reset it again, and by then, it was 9:01 p.m. So you would have had to refresh the page at least once AFTER 9:01 p.m., and not everyone did that, and everyone was confused, and the four of us coaches ran away screaming, waving our arms over our heads.

8 comments:

Carolyn Abiad said...

Thanks for all your hard work.
I kept switching windows until I came up with a working widget. Lots of refreshing. :)

Leigh Ann said...

You four are so classy.

Good luck to everyone! Flex your clicky fingers! :D

Jenn said...

Aww, you ladies are so awesome for opening another submission window! 200 entries is a lot to sift through. Thanks again for this awesome contest and I'm sorry not everything worked out the way you planned.

To everyone who is planning on entering today, keep refreshing until the widget opens, paste your already copied blog address in the box and then type your name really fast! Good luck!

Kristen Wixted said...

First, thanks again for reading all these entries.
Second, thanks for being kind and opening it to the people who couldn't get in last night.

I refreshed and refreshed, my hands shaking harder and harder, saying, "Please work, please work..." because I hadn't been fast enough yesterday morning and I had actually been PRACTICING copy and pasting the blog name and typing name. And I still messed it up--but I did make it in at #147.
Thanks again!
Yours,
http//Kristen Wixted ;)

Kaitlin said...

Wow, yall are AMAZING!

Melanie Stanford said...

That's exactly what I did: refresh refresh refresh until the widget finally appeared.

Matthew MacNish said...

I sincerely hope that everyone knows what you all are doing is out of the kindness of your hearts, because you care about good writing and great books. Having been a co-host of the A to Z blogfest (a linky list with 2000 entrants, before we removed spam) I know how difficult this can be. So I just wanted to say: THANK YOU!

Kelly Bryson said...

You guys are awesome. I can't imagine setting up a contest like this- I know it's a lot of work- thanks for all you give to the writing community!