[thechris]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Do Boy

Something along this line might have been better. But at the same time who or what qualifies someone as a veteran on the site? Anyone who was here before the contest? The year they joined? seems a little hard to pick and choose between the two. I mean I joined up before omega. But he was clearly way more active then I was. I think for them to sit there and sort through all of that would have been to much work for them

I don't know, man. There isn't a lot of manual sorting to do though, you just run a simple query from the forum database to pull the people who signed up at least say, 1 year ago, then filter it so it only displays users who have more than 240 results before 1 year ago but after 2 years ago. An average of 20 posts per month should be achievable by any regular. THEN, one last filter to make sure that they're still active by filtering the users who had new posts (or a certain number of new posts) this month, last month and the month prior to last. It may sound complicated, but it's actually not that hard. I have to write queries like these almost daily and I know this forum is PHP driven with a MySQL database. I'd be happy to help with something like this if it was needed.

I do get that part of this is in an attempt to get NEW blood to this forum. That's all cool. It's just, I dunno. Maybe rather than doing an indescriminate 3 place prize tier, do a Veteran's Prize Draw (A nice grand prize like the Sentinel we got), A General Prize Draw (A cool toy that anyone would appreciate), and A Newbies Prize Draw (Relatively inexpensive prize that's still cool). Or the 3 tier with less expensive prizes and a Veteran's prize. We ALL know that regulars post on here regularly anyway, prize or not. It's not hard to qualify and when you put a minimum post to qualify to weed out the one post wonders and make it random, you get a hell of a lot less spam.

In for fear of sounding arrogant, before we even started the contest, myself, omega, bmorr, Optimus Vader, Tiberius, Do Boy, etc, were already in the running. Some of us got medals by default based on our past contributions. Once you get a certain number of posts in, you do a random draw, you get a lot less spam. Honestly, I don't care who wins, but I can tell who's here just to put in two words to drive their count up and I'd rather those guys just shut their damn pie holes. It's beyond annoying when you see people who obviously didn't read the thread at all and ask questions that were already asked or stuff that's IN the damn title, it's painful and annoying to see.