Yep, I made an oopsie with the drawings. 😜
A fairly big and pretty brain hurty oopise, that's taken me a few days of retracing my steps so I could figure out how it happened. While I think I know what I did, I'm still not exactly sure how I did it without realizing. 😳
What did I do?
I'll get to that, but first a quick overview of how I do the drawings & delegations from sponsors every month so it all (hopefully) makes some sort of sense. But before all that, I want to make clear to my prize sponsors (other than @livinguktaiwan and @erikah) that nothing changes for who you give/gave your prizes to this month. I'm going to cover all the make-up prizes myself.
When the Qualified/Unqualified Participants lists are Official
On my laptop, I have a folder for all my Power Up Day stuff. In that folder, I have sub folders for each month - like for this past month, there's the "7. Hive Power Up Day July 2023" folder (the number so they sort nicely 😁).
When the lists are official, I take the text files with the charts and use the Text Fixer Alphabetical Order tool to not only put all the names in order, but to strip out all the extra info (power up amount, etc). I then save each list in a pair of new text files named, "Qualified winners list for drawing" and "Not Qualified winners list for drawing" in the most current folder.
Typically because I'm lazy to keep the file names consistent, when I'm doing the "save as" I will go to the previous month's folder, click the name of last month's file (so it's the same), then actually save it in the current month's folder, so I have the same file name but for different months.
Then I open two tabs on my browser for the Random Result Generator so I can do both drawings at the same time and screencap the results. I used to do before/after screencaps in case anyone ever complained (for example, if someone said, "you never pick me, how can I be sure I was in the drawing?" I could show the screencap) but with so many participants each month, I got lazy out of the habit.
PLEASE NOTE:
Seems a good time to mention that before I do the drawings, I do remove some names from both lists.
From the Qualified list, I take off the top three winners, the winners of the PIZZA prizes, and the HivePH winner to spread the prize love around more.
From the Unqualified list I remove names if they didn't qualify because their account isn't in good standing in the community, since it's meant to reward people who participated even though their power ups were too small or their starting HP and/or reputation was too high. Getting a prize while not being a good community member doesn't go with the spirit of the contest.
Just to be clear.
After that, I copy the results and put them in a draft post on PeakD because up until a few months, I would send the link for each winner's profile to the corresponding sponsor, and it made it easy to right click & copy link for each discord DM.
Like so...
Next I find the Drawings & Delegations comment for the previous month, click edit and copy the text for the current month's comment. I match it against the announcement post prize list and make any adjustments necessary (new prizes, updated prizes, etc).
Finally (yes, I'm almost done!), I copy paste the names from the drawing result draft post into the D&D comment, post the comment, then DM each sponsor with the link to the comment so they can find the names of their winners.
What went wrong?
About a half hour after I posted the comment for July & notified the sponsors, a reply came in from @verdesmeralda saying:
Ohh thank you very much, although I am not sure I have done what it takes to win this award, it is good to validate if I am really deserving. Thank you very much and blessings!
I remembered she'd won my prize in June, and had a stomach-sinking moment thinking maybe I'd copy/pasted poorly and accidentally left her on July's list. But since she was in @livinguktaiwan's spot, not mine, that didn't make sense. Plus, one of the first things I do after I c/p is to go through and delete all the names from the previous month to avoid that, so needless to say, I was flummoxed.
Since this post is already longer than I meant, I'll skip all the stuff about the current heat wave in New Hampshire melting my brain, the busy weekend that spilled into the beginning of the week that included my son's birthday, my general going in a million directions at once, and just say that after checking everything out, I discovered that @verdesmeralda wasn't alone. Only 8 of the 19 qualified accounts participated in July, and only 3 of the 4 unqualified participated in July. However everyone on both lists participated in June.
Which looks like this...
So how the f*ck did I mess up so royally?
Best that I can figure is that after putting together the drawing lists (and sending the correct one to @hivetrending so he could pick their two PIZZA winners), I shut down my computer. When I went back to do the Random Results drawings, I opened the files via my Quick Access folder on my computer.
I did a screenshot (edited because no one needs to see all my folders and files...lol) to show what I mean...
That's obviously not how it looked the day I accessed the files (I have 20 recently accessed files at the moment, so the actual list is longer), but you can see that the only difference between the two are the "June" and "July" at the end of file location line.
(yes, I'm going to start adding the month in the actual file name from here on out!)
While I can't be exactly sure, the long and short of it is that somehow I used both June lists for July's drawings. And that's the only scenario that makes sense.
How do I fix this?
Luckily I was able to tell @livinguktaiwan and @erikah right away that there was a problem and to hold off awarding their prizes until I could figure out what went wrong. But I knew a few others (including me!) had already distributed their prizes, and I didn't want to DM everyone until I knew what was going on, so I decided that once I figured it out, I'd redo a drawing and cover the new prizes myself.
This is how my current prize sponsor list looks, with the OOPSIE spots this month highlighted (and remember sponsors, you don't have to change anything, just tagging you so you're aware):
QUALIFIED
place #1: me
place #2: @livinguktaiwan
place #3: @theycallmedan via me
place #4: @theycallmedan via me
place #5: @theycallmedan via me
place #6: @theycallmedan via me
place #7: @theycallmedan via me
place #8: @raymondspeaks on behalf of brofund
place #9: @raymondspeaks on behalf of CineTV
place #10: @dswigle (delegation)
place #11: @dswigle (delegation)
place #12: @acidyo
place #13: @zekepickleman
place #14: @zekepickleman
place #15: @dibblers.dabs
place #16: @macchiata
Pizza witness winners (they draw based on my list)
place #17: @jacobtothe
place #18: @erikah
place #19: @dbooster
HivePH winner (they draw based on own criteria)
NOT QUALIFIED
place #1: @theycallmedan via me
place #2: @theycallmedan via me
place #3: @theycallmedan via me
place #4: @acidyo
As I said, @livinguktaiwan and @erikah haven't given their prizes yet, so they'll distribute them to the two new names I'm about to draw and I will give prizes to the two who didn't participate in July (for @livinguktaiwan I will match the prize, but since I don't have Actifit points like @erikah does, I will give that winner a delegation instead).
So I redid the drawings and to hopefully prevent further confusion (too late! 😂), I kept the place numbers to show the replacement prize number (rather than one to eleven, and one).
QUALIFIED LIST
NOT QUALIFIED LIST
So to break it down:
@livinguktaiwan, the winner of your prize of 20 HIVE POWER is - @denisda. And @verdesmeralda, I will be sending you 20 HIVE POWER instead of @livinguktaiwan
@philnews.xyz, @mikezillo, and @kilvnrex - you each win 10 HIVE POWER from me
@tampilyne - you win a 100 HIVE Power delegation for 4 weeks from me
@bechibenner and @strega.azure - you both win a 250 HIVE Power delegation each for 3 weeks from me
@solymi - you win a 500 HIVE Power delegation for 4 weeks from me
@splintercell-01 - you win a 200 HIVE Power delegation for 30 days AND 10 HIVE Power from me
@eddwood - you win a 100 HIVE Power delegation for 3 weeks from me
@erikah the winner of your prize of 3000 Actifit tokens is @killerwot. And since I don't have those tokens, I will be giving @pinkchic a prize of a 300 HIVE Power delegation for 4 weeks from me instead.
@nenio - you win 10 HIVE POWER from me
PHEW! I think that does it!
Because putting this together took a lot longer than expected (yes, I triple and quadruple checked everything!), I'm going to take a short dinner break after I hit, "Publish" but will be back later tonight to send out all the prizes.
Apologies for this bit of a mess. And of course it had to happen the month I was celebrating three years of managing this initiative - ugh! But at least there was a simple (if not easy) way to put this all right, and I hope this works for everyone. If not, please feel free to yell at me in the comment sections - I'll completely understand! 😊
Thank you all again for your participation and support of Hive Power Up Day!!
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