Digiex's Big January Giveaway! - Over 7000 Microsoft Points to be won

[Nimrod]

Hello and welcome to Digiex's January Giveaway!


What a way to start the new year by offering you a chance over the entire period of January to win Microsoft Points for use on Xbox Live.
There are 3 challenges going, one with a massive prize of 4000 Microsoft Points, and two easier ones where you can bag yourself 1600 Microsoft Points.

Entry into the challenges is open to every member of Digiex

This is a trial run for the month of January to see if this will work and is manageable in the long term. Providing everything goes smoothly and contestents are fair and don't abuse the contest, we will be looking to expand this every month for the rest of 2013! Thats right, giveaways every month for the next year!

Your find the 3 challenges running for this month below, you are allowed to enter more than one of the challenges.

Challenge 1 - MEGA PRIZE!

Teacher of the Month
Prize: 4000 Microsoft Points*

Summary:
This to be awarded to the user with the most detailed and original guide posted to Digiex this month.
When picking a winner we will be looking at page views, level of detail, use of images to help explain difficult points and level of uniqueness.
Winner will be chosen by vote by the Administration team of Digiex.

Exclusions:
The guide must be original (ie: brand new) and not posted elsewhere on the internet yet.
It cannot be taken from another site and must be the authors own work.

Examples:
How to burn files and folders to a CD, DVD or Blu-ray Disc using ImgBurn
How to hack a 250gb or 320gb sata drive to work in the Xbox 360 and Xbox 360 Slim

Challenge 2

Member of the Month
Prize: 1600 Microsoft Points*

Summary:
This is to be awarded to the best conversation starter on Digiex in the month of January.
A conversation starter is someone who makes new relevent threads and posts which in turn engage others to respond and reply.
When picking a winner we will be looking in the General forum areas to look for relevent, popular discussions made by users. Post count will be looked at to a degree, but isn't the deciding factor as quality over quantity is preferred.
Winner be will be chosen by vote by the Administration team of Digiex.

Exclusions:
People who post exessive spam, or look to be politing the forum with junk will be ignored for this contest.
Anyone with infractions against their account will be excluded to.

Challenge 3

Reporter of the Month
Prize: 1600 Microsoft Points*

Summary:
This is to be awarded to the best News Reporter on Digiex in the month of January.
A News Reporter is someone who finds news across the internet, then writes about it in our news submission area.
When picking a winner we will be looking at the quality of news, and how much was written by the member themselves. Having the news hit the front page is also likely to increase chances of being selected. When posting news it's important to follow the guidelines which includes using a relevent image centered at the top of the news letter, sourcing any relevent sources at the bottom and writing about the news in their own words.
Winner be will be chosen by vote by the Administration team of Digiex.

Exclusions:
People who just copy and paste news from other sites without writing up themselves will be excluded.
People who post irrelevent news which doesnt match up to the themes of Digiex (Tech/Gaming).

Examples:
Ubuntu announced for smartphones, compatible with Android Kernels and Drivers
Nintendo's European Wii U eShop only sells mature content between 11pm and 3am



How to enter:

To enter any of these 3 challenges, all you need to do is have made 1 post on Digiex between the 1st - 31st of January 2013. You will then automatically be entered into the contest!

The challenges are open till the end of January, after which we will post up the winners for all to see.

All going well, based on the response and feedback from this trial, we will look to continue this with new contests every month with the chance to win prizes from Microsoft Points, PSN Vouchers, Netflix Subscriptions and more!

The Administration team will be deciding by vote who is to win the relevent contests. Popular vote wins. There is currently 7 members of the Administration Team who will each get one vote. The person with the most votes wins! In the event of a tie, a second vote will be casted with just the two tie winners, and again popular vote will go ahead and win.

Thanks for your time, and good luck all!



* The Prize Points offered are based on the User Requesting the Points for the USA Region.
Sadly a choice by Microsoft means points are available in different amounts with different prices in various regions and as such, we offer the below values for other regions:
Big Prize: 4000 (USA), 4200 (UK/Europe), 3500 (Japan), 3200 (Asia)
Small Prize: 1600 (USA), 1440 (UK/Europe), 1400 (Japan), 1600 (Asia)
Please note Microsoft has also chosen to region lock codes, so you will require an account from the relevent region to apply the codes.
Regions not listed are not supported in this contest, however you are welcome to select any of the above regions and attempt to swap the codes outside of the contest with others, or make an account in those regions to apply the code to.



Terms and Conditions:

• Winners will be announced on the first week of February on the forum. If your a winner we will also drop you a PM to let you know.
• Microsoft Points will be delivered to you as a code to redeem on your Xbox Live account, via a PM after you let us know which region points you are after.
• Microsoft Points are region locked, and its your job to ensure you select a region for where you can redeem the code. We will not offer returns or swapping as we have to pay upfront for the codes.
• While we will make every effort to deliver the code to you straight away, please understand as this is a trial run we do not have the points to hand. We have already selected our retailers to purchase them from (Play-Asia for USA, Asia and Japan) and Game (for Europe) and will purchase the points once you have selected your region. If for any reason they are out of stock at the time, we will let you know (and send you the link so you can verify yourself if you have a trust issue with us). We will then await stock to come back in. If after a month we still are unable to secure the product for any reason, we reserve the right to send to you a cash amount via PayPal of how much the points would have cost us instead.
• Staff of Digiex are allowed to enter, provided they are Moderator Rank or below. The only reason we are allowing this is because you work so hard for Digiex unpaid, that you deserve a chance to. However you are not allowed to use any insider knowledge to your advantage and if you decide to enter the contest you are voiding yourself from being on the panel who decides the winner on any of the challenges. Please note however this giveaway is mainly aimed at members therefore your position at Digiex will work against you being a likely winner unless your posts are something extra special which deserve recognition. If you wish to enter, you must make your intentions known straight away to the Administration team so we can take you out of any discussions on the contest for fairness and transparency.
• Any abuse at staff, or receiving any infractions for bad behaviour will void your entry into the contest.
• Only one entry per person per challenge will be accepted. If it becomes apparent that a participant is trying to circumvent this by, for example, the use of multiple accounts, or stealing content from other websites and entering as their own, that person will be disqualified and any prize award will be void or transferred to another user who entered the contest.
• Posts which are to be entered into the contest, must have been made to the forum by January 31st 23:59 GMT.

 

[Rockman]

Well, hopefully this will get more users for the forum. I feel the forum's pretty quiet seeing no one else leaves any feedback or posts content.

I posted a topic/question of who'll be the king of next-gen consoles on the Official Xbox 360 Forums and it has gotten already more than 130 replies, I didn't expect for it to keep alive but people love talking there.

 

[Nimrod]

Well, hopefully this will get more users for the forum. I feel the forum's pretty quiet seeing no one else leaves any feedback or posts content.

I posted a topic/question of who'll be the king of next-gen consoles on the Official Xbox 360 Forums and it has gotten already more than 130 replies, I didn't expect for it to keep alive but people love talking there.

Well, its difficult to compare us to the official forums of the Xbox as they have unlimited marketing budget and are the official forums of Xbox, wheres we are just a standard internet forum.

But I know what you mean about the forums being quiet, we have a massively high number of visitors on at any one time (usually around 400 Visitors and only a few members at any one time). A lot of this is due to our decision to allow all our content and downloads be available to everyone without having to be forced to registration. This is still the approach we like to take, as due to it our site is much higher on page views and search engine listings than other forums with way more active members. But we also know in the longer term we would rather grow our active community, and this is one part of a whole new strategy to try and drive engagement with our current members.

Also, let's be honest no site can survive without its members, so if we can give you all prizes surely that's good in the long run?
If this one month trial goes well and we give the green light to giveaways every month I'm pretty sure every serious active member will have a prize or two by the end of the year! How many forums are you a member of where the Administration team give you free gifts for being an active member?
As it is, Digiex's active user base may be small, but there is certainly a better community feel to those users than the bigger forums (like the official Xbox forums) where no one knows eachother.

 

[Slaz]

I'm still checking/posting on Digiex mainly for the news. Even though it's not posted too frequently, I like how the Digiex frontpage embraces slightly 'alternative' tech news that you won't easely find featured on other sites. If you know what I mean.

 

[Nimrod]

I'm still checking/posting on Digiex mainly for the news. Even though it's not posted too frequently, I like how the Digiex frontpage embraces slightly 'alternative' tech news that you won't easely find featured on other sites. If you know what I mean.

That's what we aim to do
We know there is the big tech news sites out there with full time employees who can post original news way before we could and to a better quality. Therefore we aim to post more of the alternative news, betas, demos and so fourth which we know the bigger sites aren't covering.

 

[Slaz]

That's true. Basically, thanks to you guys posting such news, I got in at least 3 Xbox 360 dashboard beta's and got my free Windows 8 upgrade discount coupon. The other tech oriented sites I check are either too quick posting articles which quickly burrows 'older' news down, or aren't posting/featuring such news at all.

Digiex' articles section helped me too. Like the very detailed guide to HDDHacker which made getting a 120GB upgrade for the 360 cheap and easy!

And of course there's the JJ2 listserver up and running. I still play the game online at least weekly and Digiex indirectly does a good job keeping a stable playerbase alive for this old gem of a game!

So, perhaps you guys shouldn't mind forum activity too much and keep focusing on providing quality content, and encourage user contribution, like you're doing with this giveaway!

Cheerz!

 

[Crouching Tiger]

I look forward to joining in.

 

[seanpr92]

Hey do you reckon you can do this for steam maybe

 

[InsaneNutter]

A Steam gift is something we have considered for future months, presuming this give away trial is a success and we continue with it. We have planned for various different digital gifts, Xbox points were chosen for this month as a lot of people here own an Xbox 360.

 

[Rockman]

Amazon gift vouchers would work too, so they would have more choice in what they'd like to redeem it with.

Not saying 800 MSP to 1600 MSP aren't enough (it's actually more than enough) to purchase a game, game add-on, film, tv series' episode or etc on Xbox.

 

[Nimrod]

Amazon gift vouchers would work too, so they would have more choice in what they'd like to redeem it with.

Not saying 800 MSP to 1600 MSP aren't enough (it's actually more than enough) to purchase a game, game add-on, film, tv series' episode or etc on Xbox.

The problem we have though, is different regions. Sadly theres not many gift cards / other digital gifts which work region wide. It was hard enough doing Microsoft Points as we have had to limit it to four regions with slightly different amounts for each prize. Somethings like amazon which would be great, would be terribly hard to give out as we couldn't buy a gift card for day someone in Canada with our Amazon UK accounts.

The other solution is perhaps a cash prize paid by Paypal, but for some reason giving away cash just feels weird compared to an actual prize (like a gift card). We may consider more selected prizes like Amazon UK / US only, and then say for the winners if they are not in that region they can receive PayPal or Microsoft Points instead as compensation, but lets review it once we see if this January Giveaway is a success. At the moment the reaction seems a little mixed, there's been a few people doing a some things towards the prizes, but not the major activity that was hoped meaning the value of the prizes doesn't reflect how much time our members are willing to commit. Therefore if we do a February once, based on current activity there won't be a mega prize, just a few small prizes.

 

[Rockman]

Giving someone their reward by PayPal would be pretty much money, and then there's the fee, to pay which is considerably small, I think.

Anyway, it's the 24th January and the forum hasn't gotten much users activity, i.e, comments/posts so this might not be turning out as expected?

 

[Nimrod]

Anyway, it's the 24th January and the forum hasn't gotten much users activity, i.e, comments/posts so this might not be turning out as expected?

At the moment the reaction seems a little mixed, there's been a few people doing a some things towards the prizes, but not the major activity that was hoped meaning the value of the prizes doesn't reflect how much time our members are willing to commit. Therefore if we do a February ones, based on current activity there won't be a mega prize, just a few small prizes.

 

[Slaz]

Perhaps people rarely have the time to post on forums these days, due to the large amount of Facebook activity (read: addiction).

 

[Rockman]

Perhaps people rarely have the time to post on forums these days, due to the large amount of Facebook activity (read: addiction).

Well, so and the addiction of playing CoD MW3/BO2 and Battlefield 3.

I haven't tried Battlefield 3 but heard it's a great FPS, though, I just rather stick to Call of Duty online.

 

[Nimrod]

Just a heads up, there is only a few days left for anyone wishing to enter!

Also, we're likely going to do February Giveaway, so we're now open to suggestions on what people want for the prizes. (PSN, Netflix, Steam Game? etc)

 

[Rockman]

Netflix like LOVEFiLM and NOWTV offer 30 free days of use, so kind of a waste, unless it's 2-3 months that the membership will last.

 

[Rockman]

So how did this work out for Digiex's side?

 

[Nimrod]

So how did this work out for Digiex's side?

Overall mixed. It started well but interest died down quickly. We got a lot of feedback from people that it was too much of a task for people to want to enter for only a chance to win (ie putting hours in, and then not winning).
We think were continue it but no where near as big as this. Also future prizes will be much easier to win so all our loyal members will get a chance for a freebie as a thank you.

The votes are up in the Staff area so we will be posting the results in the coming day.

 

[Rockman]

It's quite disappointing this didn't work out, I guess if Digiex were more popular and users registered to chat and all, things would've been different.

But anyway, people do visit Digiex, however, they tend to download without account, some of them I suppose only want the content and nothing else.