Petition to make contests available to guilds

[kittenofanarchy]

There's this obnoxious little guild rule that the neopets staff has instilled and it makes it so no guild contests that has prizes in any form given away can be done. This is one of the most annoying rules ever, so I invite you to sign my Guild Contest Petition. Neomail me (kittenofanarchy) or post here with Neopets username to sign. The site with all the signatures is in my sig (below). Please sign, as only 4 people have signed thus far.

[Anoohilator]

I personally shan't be signing this as I have seen the bad effects of allowing this rule more than the good ones. A helpful tip would be to have the names going down vertically in a numbered list, so people can more clearly see how many people have signed up

[Jasujo]

There is a good reason for this rule, though. There were quite a few people scamming off of "contests". They'd hold a contest and say you had to donate or buy whatever in their shop to buy a ticket, then themselves on a different account or a friend would "win" it and they'd keep everything. All contests had to be banned onsite because of this. It sucks as I love holding giveaways myself, but you have to do it offsite if you want to hold one. Why not just get a webpage or forum for your guild and hold it there? There are many places to get free web pages and it'd be really easy to set up. That's what a lot of guilds and such are doing now. Also, if you have a seperate place outside of Neopets to go to you can talk about filtered things like eBay all you want.

[mogster500]

You can have games in your guild, as long as you don't say there are prizes. I remember Neopets saying this.

[Cranberry]

I agree with the people who've posted above -- TNT made this rule for a reason, but if you like, it's easy enough to get around it if you hold your contests on a non-Neopets site. And anyway, online petitions don't work for many reasons, including the following:

Paper-and-ink petitions are signed in a variety of handwriting styles, each unique to its signer. Consequently, signatures on a paper-and-ink petition cannot easily be faked else certain glaring similarities would show up in one entry after another.

E-petitions, however, come with no such assurance — the same person could have generated all of the signatures. Moreover, it takes little by way of programming skills to create a sequence of code that will randomly generate fake names, e-mail addresses, and cities (or whatever combination of same the e-petition calls for). Once written, such a program can be executed with a keystroke, resulting in the effortless generation of thousands upon thousands of "signatures."

Those in a position to influence anything know this and thus accord e-petitions only slightly more respect than they would a blank sheet of paper. Thus, even the best written, properly addressed, and lovingly delivered e-petitions whose every signature was scrupulously vetted by the petition's creator fall into the same vortex of disbelief at the receiving end that less carefully shepherded missives find themselves relegated to.

[everconfused]

Actually, the no contest/giveaway/raffle/ftp rules have been around for awhile, at least as long as I've been on the site (3+ years).

TNT decided to enforce the rule because too many people were being scammed. And even with the rule being enforced, there are still 'contest' scams. I personally think that guild shops should be done away with. There's no real need for "donations" to a guild since there are no contests, etc., allowed.

I've seen more than my share of boards of people saying they donated x amount of np or items for guild rank, for a competition, game, whatever ... only to have the person in charge of said "donation" up and leave the guild or actually close the guild and keep all the np/items.

And, no, online petitions don't work. Neither does mass emailing TNT about something. At least, that's what a staff member posted on a board once.