Reviewing the Monster Raffle

The SGS Monster Raffle is finally Done and Dusted. To be honest it’s a bit of a relief because after a 4 year break I really wanted it to work and for the most part I think it did. That said, it’s always good to have a review of proceedings because maybe things can be done better or maybe something happened that I completely missed. So I’m throwing up a Review Post and I promise it’ll be the last post I make about the Monster Raffle for a while…

The feedback from the previous Monster Raffle was that it took too long and it was a bit chaotic because of the cross-talk and text spam while the draw was going on. So this time we set up some Dedicated Channels for Voice and Text and locked them down a bit so that we could keep things on track. That worked in resolving those identified issues. The draw was pretty efficient for the most part and we did get the entire event completed in just under an hour, which was great….but we did have a bit of an issue with some of the communications.

We had a misunderstanding over the random numbers generated for the prizes of winners who weren’t present and there was some general confusion over how or where people needed to communicate their choices. Thankfully @dfinney was present and she stepped in to try and help explain things, but communications is an area we could definitely improve.

I really wanted there to be a 2nd Voice Channel where members could chat and catch up with each other while the draw was going on. My original idea was to pull any winners over into the main voice channel and un-mute them so they could make their prize choices, but that wasn’t technically possible. I’m not sure if that was a permissions issue or just a Discord feature. I’m putting that down as one of those scenarios I wasn’t really able to test for in my attempted Dry Run. Maybe we can sort that out if there is a next time.

I also wasn’t entirely comfortable with the Proxy thing, but thankfully that wasn’t really an issue. We only had 3 Registered Proxies but 1 of them WAS used so it kind of worked. The other tricky issue in the lead-up was the transferring of Raffle Tickets. It was great that accounts like @spinvest were buying tickets to give away but I really didn’t want to be tracking ticket transfers because it looked like a Can of Worms and I didn’t want too much administrative overhead. One day we’ll probably do NFT Raffle Tickets so that people can throw them around like confetti, but that’s still a way off.

As for the prizes, there is always a couple of big spenders who make out like bandits. This time we had @fat-elvis cleaning up and scoring 13 ounces. Old mate @welshstacker did pretty well by winning a few times too. It was really good to see some of our newer members and first time Monster Rafflers @trumpman, @mraggaj and @bitcoinman in the Winners column and we might just have sparked a bit of Stackitis in some of the new faces from outside the membership like @melinda010100 and @littlebee4 who also picked up some handy wins.

Overall I’m pretty happy with how it went and very thankful for everybody's help and involvement. Especially my partner-in-crime @welshstacker who took care of things while I was scrambling with the spreadsheets and our stalwart moderator @dfinney who jumped in at just the right time to clarify issues. I’m keen to hear how everyone else thought it went though. Were there things you liked? Or didn’t? Got any suggestions for how things could be better. Don’t be shy, please comment below!