A short notice and a poll.

[zanzando]

Our first giveaway has ended and the winner should have her copy of The Iron King in a few days. Again, congratulations! :D

I'm planning a new giveaway soon, but I'm open to suggestions should anyone have any. (See also: how to make my TBR pile grow.)
I'm currently without an internet connection at home, so I'll be online only sporadically. I do however have access to my email accounts 24/7, which means any and all comments here will reach me.

Meanwhile! I was wondering whether you guys would like linkspam type posts every now and then to offsite giveaways.

Poll #3333 Linkspams

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 4

View Respondents

Would you like to see linkspam posts here?

View Answers

Yes!
4 (100.0%)

No.
0 (0.0%)

Maybe.
0 (0.0%)

If you've voted for "maybe", please tell me more (why, how, etc.)!

View Answers

Comments

[dingsi]

I don't see how linkspams would hurt :) But I wondered, sometimes giveaways are only available to people from a certain location/country, or have other requirements, and in that case I'd like to see the items grouped in some way. It would be disappointing to click on a promising link only to get told "sorry, not for you".

[zanzando]

Oh, excellent suggestion.

It's probably a good idea to add tags as well, such as "giveaway: international", or "giveaway: contest" or something like that.

[dingsi]

... I LOVE tags. Especially in communities.

[zanzando]

Awesome.

... well I'm a LIS (Library and Information Science) student. I'm all for tags, but tend to want to go overboard and then minimalise it to avoid the former. Just, idk, hit me over the head and tell me if you'd like to see something specific.

[dingsi]

Well I think mainly I just want a way to differentiate the giveaways that are limited or have requirements from the ones that are not limited in any way.
Categories for medium or content would be nice, too -- i.e. is it a book, a game, is it a download or a physical item... that sort of thing. I wouldn't need the tags to be extremely detailed, though.

Oh, I almost forgot -- I'd love having a tag for giveaways that are still open vs. closed/unavailable ones. Granted, that's not very feasible for websites because you can't check all of them regularly -- though people could leave a comment when they encounter a dead link? -- but it would help in instances where it's a one-time offer, a contest or "first come, first served" hosted by individual people.

[zanzando]

Well. I was thinking that if I do linkspams, I would make them in list format and group them (contests, i.e. you have to do something other than comment, first-come-first-serve, simple giveaways, ...).
Within the list I'd add deadlines and nationality requirements in brackets. That way I don't have to edit the entries all the time, and giveaways tend to have relatively short deadlines.
I'll need to setup an rss reader to check sites that regularly do giveaways and maybe a twitter list for that purpose.
Checking the FCFS entries isn't realistic unfortunately. We'd need a different platform for that, were edits can be made GUI style.

With actual linkspams it's not really practical to do tags on the entry since they would cover all of the links.

Hmm. I think it'll settle into something usable once I actually start doing it. Got to compile the code so to speak. :)

Re: content.
I've tentatively started doing that already, I just need to keep up enforcing that (see effex' post, which should be tagged "manga", "doujinshi" or similar).
As for downloads vs. physical items I think it's sufficient to only tag downloads as such.
Speaking of these categories, I suppose the grouping in the linkspams could be hierarchical (first by content type, then by giveaway category or the other way around).

[zanzando]

And I could put the deadline in the entry title and add "first come first serve" as a tag if applicable.

[dingsi]

... uh, yes. I just noticed that I replied in the sense of tagging in general, and forgot that the original subject was/is about linkspams in particular.