Each month on the 15th, the sponsor and the prize will be announced. The drawing will be held on the last day of each month. The winner will be contacted by PM or email using the information provided during registration. The winner will be contacted before any announcement is made to the community. The winner will then be announced in the forum and most likely in our News Section. We kindly ask that the winner please post a response when the prize is received, so that other members know that this is a legitimate contest. Most prizes are not physically held by us. More often than not, we will send you directly to the sponsor for prize delivery arrangements.

Because of the great prizes and content on this site, we get plenty of visitors. What we want most are new participating members in the forums. We want this site to be THE place to share your security experiences. The winner will be chosen at our discretion based on forum participation and quality of content. You give back to the IT community through this site, and we will reward those efforts.

Clearly measuring the quality of posts is not an exact science. But it is quite easy to tell if someone is padding post stats or truly contributing. The admin features of this forum allow me to easily view all posts for each member. You can quickly see if posts contain short answers or congratulations for one thing or another. Longer posts usually mean that a member took the time to explain the situation and the resolution. That's where our focus will be... on sharing our experiences and giving back to the IT community. This has always been an asset of individuals in this field.

We will also look at the topic associated with the giveaway. If the giveaway is (this is only an example) Red Hat cert vouchers, someone contributing their experiences with Linux and Red Hat administration will clearly be noticed. Anyone posting topics like, "Gee, I really would like to win this" will also be noticed, but for the wrong reasons.

Bottom line is that we want to reward those who deserve it and not just because their name was pulled from a hat.

Not redeemable for cash. No exchange. Prizes must be claimed 60 days from notification. Free S&H in the continental US for prizes delivered directly from us under 1 pound. Winner is responsible for all other associated S&H charges. Prizes being delivered directly from 3rd parties follow their rules. We are not responsible for replacing lost prizes. Legal details can change without notice. Employees of The Digital Construction Company are not eligible.

Don

Negrita,

You are correct. This is a rule as stated on CSP Mag, but I'm torn on whether to keep it as a hardened rule. Here are my thoughts:

I want to keep it as an un-written rule of the competition. We will still use it as a tie-breaker, but if we have someone who clearly deserves to be rewarded, and no one else puts in the effort to give back to the community, so be it. But as this site grows in membership and participation, we are starting to see that it is much easier to select top contributors without choosing a previous winner.

As a previous winner yourself, do you think it's important to include?

Always looking for feedback,
Don

I joined CSP before I knew that I could win prizes there and I joined this site here when the registration page was one of the only pages on the site (I think the layout was green then).

I've never posted to win any prizes, and I've never checked the content of my posts for quality. I still continue to contribute to both sites, even though I know that I've already won one of the prizes and will continue to do so in the future. Winning the prize was like an added bonus to me and hopefully I'll use it as a career enhancing stepping stone.

I feel like one of the community both here and at CSP, and while I realise that there will be more eligible members to win the prizes in the future, not being able to become eligible again in the future is like being excluded from part of a party. I do agree that winners should be excluded from winning for a certain period of time but not forever.

Ahh... sorry about that. 

Well yes, that's fine by me.

We're global, baby!!

Don

After reading the rules, it's going to be a while before I can give back to the community! I am retired military with intel experience but not on the security side. I mean we all learned it and lived it, but that was a while ago. Since retirement, I've just been on the Windows Sys Admin side of the network and working my way back to security (slowly).

You can "give back" by asking good questions and participating in discussions. If you look at previous winners, you'll see they have been people who are experts and have been active in the forums for years, newbies with a handful of posts, and everyone in between.

And now that I know that me living in Germany doing CyberSecurity with my GI BILL via an American uni will not disqualify me from winning, then maybe three posts a day will do it!