News and commentary from LookContests.com

As you may have noticed, I’ve run a couple of posts on ContestCanada.net to invite new members to LookContests.com. There’s been a lot of interest and, to be honest, I’m struggling to keep up with approving the new accounts and responding to questions and comments. The biggest problem so far has been that a lot of the automatic e-mails that are sent from the site are being marked as spam and not making to the proper inboxes. I’m trying to sen the invitations manually to ensure that they arrive safely, but it’s a slow process.

If you’ve added your name to the waiting list but haven’t yet heard from me, please rest assured that I will be contacting you soon. If you want to expedite the process, send me an e-mail at webmaster@lookcontests.com and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

March has been a very busy month for LookContests.com, so it’s fitting that I’ve just completed a new set of changes on the last day before we move into April.

Before I get to what was changed, though, I want to give credit to LookContests member Ron for suggesting all of these improvements. He sent me a great list of enhancements this morning and I was more than happy to implement them as soon as possible. I hope to hear lots more from Ron and from everyone else as well. With feedback like this, the site will continue to get better and better.

So, here are the changes:

• The default view when you go to “Today’s Contests” is now “New”, which by default will display any contest that has been added since you last signed into LookContests.com.
• On a similar subject, if you don’t like the fact that a contest is considered new only if it’s been added since your last visit, you can now go to Settings and change it. For example, if you want any contest added in the past week to be flagged as new regardless of when you last signed in, you can go to Settings, un-check the box labelled “Only contests created since my last login are new” and enter 7 in the box labelled “Contests are new for this many days“.
• When adding a new contest, you are now prompted to enter the URL first. If the URL already exists in our database, you are notified that the contest likely already exists. This should help prevent duplicate entries. If it really is a new contest with the same URL, you can still choose to proceed.
• Each contest listing has a small “+” sign that you can click to see more details. Perhaps you’d rather have the details shown by default rather than having to click to see them? In that case, go to Settings and check the box labelled “Expand listings by default“.
• The Activity Log now shows you today’s activity automatically. You can still change the dates to choose any time period that you like.

Enjoy!

Mike

As you probably know, our contests listings come from http://contestcanada.net. While we take steps to ensure that the contest information is accurate and complete, there will always be situations where the details are misunderstood or a mistake is made.

Up until now, the best way for you to correct an error that you’ve discovered has been to send me an e-mail. And while I’m happy to make the corrections as soon as I can, it’s not a very efficient process.

To improve this, I’ve added a new “Correction” button that is displayed in the contest details:

Clicking this button will bring you to a page that lists all of the relevant information for the contest. You may change anything that you think is incorrect.

When you submit the information, the changes do not take effect right away. However, I will be notified each time a change is submitted, and after a quick review, the modifications with either be accepted or rejected.

Please take the time to submit corrections whenever you see inaccurate information. Everyone will benefit from having the most accurate contest details.

As always, please let me know if you have any question, concerns, or suggestions.

Mike

webmaster@lookcontests.com

A number of recent changes have made the old cheat sheet a bit obsolete, so here’s an updated version:

You’ll note that I’ve added the contest frequency to the display. It was previously only available when you clicked the ‘+’ sign on the right. This should make it a bit easier to get the key information when you’re viewing contests in any of the views that display a mix of daily, weekly, monthly, and single-entry contests.

One of the site’s members sent me a great idea the other day (thanks Ron!), so I’ve implemented it. On your settings page, you now have the option to limit your contests to those that are open exclusively to Canadians. This hadn’t occurred to me prior to Ron mentioning it, but it makes perfect sense. I know a lot of people feel that the odds are much better when the contests aren’t open to US residents.

Hopefully this will be a handy feature for some of our members. If you have any ideas of how this can be improved, please be sure to contact me.

Now that you can enter your own contests, it has been pointed out to me that there’s not a convenient way to see just the ones you’ve entered. They show up in the regular views for “weekly”, “daily”, “favourites”, etc, but they can be difficult to track down this way.

To address this, I’ve added a new view for “entered by me”, which will show all contests that you’ve created that are still active.

I’ve also changed the name of the “My Contests” button to “Today’s Contests”:

Previously, the button name was a bit misleading as it would appear that it should list all of the contests that you’ve created, but in actuality it was just a way to get back to the views of your contests after you’ve done a search or something like that. I’m sure I haven’t explained this very well! Questions? Comments? Let me know.

In the current release, I’ve added a new view of the contests that are expiring soon.  That way, if you’re short on time and you just want to make sure that you’re not missing out, you can select this view and quickly enter the most urgent contests.

You’ll find this view in the drop-down list of views, along with “monthly”, “weekly”, “new”, etc.

Be sure to contact me if you have any questions or comments.

As promised earlier in the week, I’ve added the ability to enter your own contests.  It’s not fancy, but it’s functional.  Before you add a contest, though, it’s a good idea to search for it first and make sure that it’s not already in the database.

Anyway, give it a try and let me know what you think.

We’ve got quite a few people using LookContests.com on a daily basis these days, so I thought this might be a good time to write about the next steps for the site.

First and foremost, I’m making changes that will allow you to add contests that aren’t already included. As you probably know, the contests that are listed on LookContests.com all come from our partner site, ContestCanada.net. They’ve got pretty thorough coverage of the Canadian contest landscape, but they don’t find everything. So, in the future, if you know of a contest that isn’t included in our listings, you’ll be able to add it.

To make adding them even easier, I’ve been working on a toolbar. The toolbar will make it very easy to submit contests that you come across when you’re browsing. It will also have a button that will allow you to quickly search for contests on LookContests.com, and a form-filler.

You may have noticed that our contest listings occasionally (yes, it’s rare, but it does happen) contain errors. Sometimes a weekly contest is listed as monthly, or the contest URL may be incorrect.

I’d like to add functionality so that when you encounter one of these mistakes, you can quickly submit a form that will inform me of the mistake and I can ensure that it is corrected.

So, that’s a brief summary of what I’m working on.  Have you got a killer idea for the site? If so, let me know.

webmaster@lookcontests.com

LookContests.com is open to new users on an invite-only basis right now.  Anyone who wants to join has to add their name to a waiting list.

If you’re already a member, you have the power to invite friends to join the site, and they get to bypass the waiting list!  Everyone has been set up with a limit of five invitations that they’re allowed to use.

To invite a friend, just enter their e-mail address on the main page after you’ve signed in.  Make sure you type the address correctly.  They’ll be sent an e-mail indicating the steps that they have to take to complete their membership.