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Quoting the announcement blog post from August 19th:

This contest will be going on for the next two weeks starting Monday the 29th at 00:00 UTC!

The 29th was five days ago.

The announcement both stated next two weeks and August 29th, which doesn't match. But still, exact date and time (and time zone) trumps the rest of the sentence IMO.

Today, on the SU home page:

The Super User 2nd anniversary contest ends Sunday! Cast your final vote for the Most Valuable Super User and submit your blog posts now.

This is tomorrow.

This might have been the shortest two weeks I have ever experienced. This will be a surprise for folks aiming for the prizes, for example, I can imagine more blog posts coming next week.

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  • 1
    I went ahead and killed that message for now.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Sep 3, 2011 at 13:33
  • 1
    Oh dear. This seems to be a rather serious typo... it should have read "Monday the 19th". As you can see, the 29th was not even a Monday. I'm not really sure what we should do here... the contest was announced as "starting" on the site on the 19th and was posted then, and we saw a corresponding increase in activity. So do we continue the contest with the incorrectly posted dates, or end it at the intended scheduled time?
    – nhinkle Mod
    Commented Sep 3, 2011 at 15:23
  • 3
    @nhinkle Your calendar shows September already. This refers to August when 22nd and 29th were Mondays.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Commented Sep 3, 2011 at 15:34
  • @DanielBeck: oh, right. Correct. It seems we just put the wrong data in the blog post.
    – nhinkle Mod
    Commented Sep 3, 2011 at 19:30

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Those who found out about this from the blog, and started 7 days late, will certainly be disadvantaged. But they'll still be disadvantaged if the contest is extended, since those who started on time will also have the extra week.

I say end the contest on time, and apologize for being human. There's no way to accurately determine who was disadvantaged, so there's no way to appropriately compensate them.

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    This seems like the best course of action. I will update the blog post to reflect this, and will reinstate the message. FWIW, they've only missed 7 days - the contest started on Monday the 22nd.
    – nhinkle Mod
    Commented Sep 3, 2011 at 19:32
  • @nhinkle: Not necessarily, given that the announcement message changed at the start.
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Sep 5, 2011 at 18:56
  • @Tom well what's done is done, unfortunately.
    – nhinkle Mod
    Commented Sep 5, 2011 at 19:07
  • @nhinkle: I don't see the problem, daily visitors did see the message that announced it has started.
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Sep 5, 2011 at 19:22
  • @Tom so we agree then? The contest ended when it was originally intended to, and most people already saw the message, as you said.
    – nhinkle Mod
    Commented Sep 5, 2011 at 19:23
  • @nhinkle: My first comment reflected "they've only missed 7 days".
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Commented Sep 5, 2011 at 19:59
  • @Tom oh I see what you mean. Yes. I guess I should have said "at most" 7 days. Most people were aware of the full extent of the contest, as I mentioned in my comment on the question.
    – nhinkle Mod
    Commented Sep 5, 2011 at 20:06

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