This is a reply some of the discussion in this thread.To catch everyone up who didn't read that thread, Bob publicly accused me of deleting a post of his as part of some conspiracy.
For posterity:
Did you intend to enter this in the contest?
I
did enter, with
over an hour to spare, based on the rules in the form that had been posted here for months.
"7/24/2009 11:59 PM EST" <-- yes, I know that's not what it says now, but that's what it said for all but the last two days.
But after seeing the dick move of altering the posted rules to attempt to cover up a mistake of a simple hour, instead of just simply accepting and learning from it, and allowing a few entries to be up to an hour later than mister high-and-mighty originally intended, I have decided that
the contest is not worthy. And then
I deleted the post pointing here.
As for the contest threads, can you please cut it out. I made an honest mistake, and your posts are actually causing some problems. The contest has concluded. If people couldn't figure out for themselves that I had made an honest mistake, that is not my fault. I only noticed the issue this evening and by the time I got to comment on it to correct the situation, time had run out.
Those are not the words of am adult who knows how to accept and live with even a small mistake. Those are not the words of someone whose true goal here is to help the community.
Those are the words of someone who still owes me hundreds of dollars worth of blasters which I paid for in plenty of time to receive all of by Christmas, who has the GALL to attempt to use that undelivered merchandise as leverage to cover up his mistake.
Rather than just accept a few more entries that were posted in the last few minutes of a three month window.
In protest over those excluded modders - automatron and a couple others that people in the chat said happened on the other sites - I removed my entry.
All he had to do was say "yeah, okay - entries will be accepted until an hour later than what everyone can see I had really intended." What would be hard about that? How many could there be, and what possible harm to the community could accepting them cause? But no, covering up the mistake was deemed more important. It seems he even got jwasko to help out with what amounts to a "coverup" by altering the posted
rules just for this tiny little mistake.
And since that's pure politics, I'm not entirely confident FU is worthy.
I had fun building this blaster. That was
supposed to be the point.
By my memory, I did not delete your post, Bob; I hid it from view (by the general population...mods and admins could still see it). I did not hide it because of some hidden agenda or because Badger told me to. I did it because it was posted in a thread that specifically stated:
WE ASK THAT YOU DO NOT POST IN THE COMPETITION THREAD IF YOU ARE NOT POSTING AN ENTRY. THIS IS TO REDUCE CONFUSION FOR THE JUDGES. ALL NON-COMPETITION ENTRIES WILL BE REMOVED BY THE ADMINISTRATOR-JUDGE.
Someone deleted it later, probably at the same time that this post was deleted:
Now it is less than one minute left.
I was never good at EST and EDT.
ENTRY PERIOD IS NOW CLOSED!!!
So ... you recognize your error now, but are not willing to live with it?
This is really not a good time to change the rules. It said EST, on all three forums. I checked yesterday, and I posted a warning about it, too. There's still more than 45 minutes left.
The entry above by atomatron, for example, has clearly met the rules
as they have been published for months. ALL YOUR ACID ARE BELONG TO US, TOO
Upon seeing your post concerning "holding us" to the EST end time, I changed the end time to
7/24/2009 11:59 PM eastern time
If you look at the bottom of that post, you'll see that the last edit to that post was done on July 23, 2009, 01:23:53 AM . This was done soon after hiding your post.
By the way: I put 11:59pm to cicumvent issues with the date. In my opinion, 7/24/09 12:00am is during the night of July 23. But I saw no reason to bother Badger with such things as a minute. I figured I would accept all entries up to midnight.
Although, I really didn't expect to get any entries after 11:00 pm anyway. I figured: "Who in their right mind would wait until the last hour?"
Thirdly: One may wonder why I changed it to "eastern time" instead of "EDT." Well, for one thing: it was late and I was tired. Honestly, I thought, "Who (besides Bob) is really going to care about this? I'll just put 'eastern time' and leave it at that."
I assumed that no one would actually take the time (or even think) to add another hour. I figured (for instance) a West Coast person would simply add 3 hours to his/her pacific time as usual.
Fourthly: At this point I start to feel quite guilty for treating the matter so lightly. But then I remember that I actually sent a mass-PM to everyone stating the following:
Dear Member,
July has begun, meaning that the end of the "Mother of All Modification Contests" is rapidly approaching. If you plan to enter the contest on Foam Universe, please post your modification's writeup in the Modification forum of Foam Universe and post a link to that thread in the
Submission thread.
The deadline is July 24 at 9:00pm EST.
Regards,
The Foam Universe - Nerfers Unite! Team.
Note that I stated the end time at
9:00pm EST. This was not a mistake; this was the original end time of the contest, as seen in this PM from Badger:
This competition will run from 4/13/2009 at 9:00 PM EST until 7/24/2009 9:00 PM EST.
This was changed after Badger PMed me via NerfHQ:
Hey man. I am having a lot of issues with getting on FU (I PMed BIGjuevos through my phone as it froze and infected my computer, then locked up and froze my phone after being sent) and there is an update that needs to be posted on my behalf at FU for the competition.
Here is the post:
Hey everyone! There are only 6 days left before the entry window is closed on the 24th at midnight EST this coming Friday. I wanted to touch base with everyone to get this out, as well as to an overdue update to the prizes. I got one of the changes a couple of months ago, so this will really sweeten the pot for anyone that has been holding back from entering.
First Place---In addition to the stock NF you get for winning for the forum you entered on and getting the $25 deposit to your PayPal account (or $25 Visa GiftCard if you don't have PayPal), you are now getting, instead of a BBB modded by Captain Slug, you are now getting a SM1500 modded by Slug.
Second Place---You win the stock NF and now you also get a NIB AT2K from my collection. We figured that second place needed a lttle bit more.
Third Place---You are still winning the NF and the satisfaction that you won for the forum you posted your entry onto.
Get cracking everyone!!! Not much time left to get those entries in.
Keep in touch with me here until FU is fixed.
Badger
This info, in addition to being added to the original rules post, was posted in FU's Mother of All Modification Contests discussion thread:
Badger has asked me to make this post announcing a couple of changes to the contest:
Hey everyone! There are only 6 days left before the entry window is closed on the 24th at midnight EST this coming Friday. I wanted to touch base with everyone to get this out, as well as to an overdue update to the prizes. I got one of the changes a couple of months ago, so this will really sweeten the pot for anyone that has been holding back from entering.
First Place---In addition to the stock NF you get for winning for the forum you entered on and getting the $25 deposit to your PayPal account (or $25 Visa GiftCard if you don't have PayPal), you are now getting, instead of a BBB modded by Captain Slug, you are now getting a SM1500 modded by Slug.
Second Place---You win the stock NF and now you also get a NIB AT2K from my collection. We figured that second place needed a little bit more.
Third Place---You are still winning the NF and the satisfaction that you won for the forum you posted your entry onto.
So, through all of these updates: the original posting, the mass PM, and finally the posted update to the contest rules, only one person brought up the difference between EST and EDT.
And this was done only (approximately) two days before the contest ended.
Maybe I should have contacted Badger when Bob brought it up. But maybe you guys should have posted your entries early just to be on the safe side, since issues with one's computer or the site itself (and we have been having issues, as has been stated via emails, forum posts, on Foamtalk, and in the IRC chat) may have slowed the posting of your entry.
Who is at fault here? As far as I see it, Badger may share it, but so do I, Just Some Bob, and everyone that waited until the last minute.
Badger: made a simple mistake.
I: made a larger mistake.
Bob: You were the one that realized the mistake. Yet all you did to rectify it was to make a single post on the smallest NIC forum on the internet; why not post on all three forums? Why didn't you PM Badger directly? Or, if you did PM him and did not get a response, why didn't you ask me to PM/email Badger? I would have gladly contacted him if you had better stated your fears concerning the EDT/EST mistake.
Everyone else: Seriously, people, we gave you
three months.
I am now locking this thread until there is something (like winners) to be announced. If anyone wants to pursue the hysteria that this EST/EDT mistake has caused, feel free to PM me.
And in the future, Bob: don't insult me publicly. That's what PMs are for.
For everyone's information: I've now
wasted over an hour of my time (and my brother's, since he needs the computer for something) finding and gathering together all of the quotes and putting them together into a single, sensical post.
tl;dr: PM me if you need to discuss the contest or insult me.
