Cleaning the Archives Winner Announced + More Incentives for September!

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Today I am happy to announce the winner of the Cleaning the Archives draw.

But before I do so, I would like to thank everyone who participated.  It is actually painful to have only one winner, as I know that many of you have invested quite a bit of time in helping me clean up the archives.  There is still a lot of cleaning to do, but with your help, I have deleted more than 2,000 threads so far from the archives.

The way I proceeded to select the winner is simple.  I asked MYSQL to select randomly one of the votes from the thumbsup/down database.  The first vote that came up was from a user that rated more than 5000 threads in August  I had a good look at the potential winner's ratings, but could not make any sense out of them.  Many very good threads were given the thumbs-down, while many much worse threads were given the thumbs-up.  I didn't expect and need to agree with all the ratings for a user to win, but to me, the ratings really looked random.  I then looked at the timing of the ratings and indeed, there was an average delay of 2 seconds between them - which would explain the randomness.

So I went ahead and asked MySQL to spit out a second random vote from a different user. 

This time, the user that came out had rated a total of 433 threads in August.  I had a good look at the ratings, and I agreed with most of them.  So Ladies and Gentlement, I am happy to announce that the winner of the iPad is "Cryptoman".   I thought I recognized this username, and indeed, Cryptoman is a blogger here.  

I will soon be in touch with Cryptoman and send him his iPad or $500 prize.

For September, I will try something different.  Instead of one big prize, there will be several smaller ones:  10 individuals who will have rated some threads in September will win $50.  Like in August, every vote that you will cast in September will give you one extra chance to win.  But again, the ratings must make sense and be carefully cast.  Simply follow these guidelines:

- If you are not sure about the value of a thread, just skip it instead of flipping a coin.   

- If you think that a thread should be deleted from the site, because it won't be of any help to anyone, give it a thumbs-down rating. Ask yourself: "If someone finds this thread through a Google search, will the thread potentially help this user or will the user leave really quickly because the page doesn't offer any useful info?"

The best "raters" to me are those that I can rely on their ratings to actually delete some content from the site.  If I agree with 99% of your thumbs-downs, I can just go ahead and automate the deletion process and it saves me a lot of time.  

Thanks a lot again for your partcipation!

Stephane Boucher  

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