I'm annoyed. >:I (about the contest, see below)

     Okay, so today wasn't the best day (Monday=lame, and I was late to my first class. :( Never sets a good impression!), and to top it off, I got a reply from my emailed question to the contest organizers.

     Some background: I wrote to the contest people yesterday (or Saturday) after I found a little note in the contest entries that made it sound like the guides and reviews had to be submitted DURING the contest in order to qualify. So, being the overachiever I am, I sent a message asking whether this was true or not, or it meant that the guide had to be EDITED or something during the time.

     Here's the responce I got:

Thank you for writing eBay in regard to eBay's $100,000 Blogs, Reviews,
and Guides Giveaway.

Regrettably, previously submitted reviews cannot be submitted a second
time to qualify for the promotion.

     I'm like, wha? (I cut out his and my name and the link to the contest for clarity ^^; hope no one minds!) So, this either means, A) unless you WROTE your guide during the contest timespan, you can't win anything, or B) you can't resubmit your guide multiple times to cheat. At least, those are the options I get from it.

     Now, I completely COMPLETELY understand option B; heck, we all want an honest contest too! :) But option A is bothering me. If it IS true (which I'm strongly inclined to believe it is), that means that all older guides are void for this contest. Now, while this seems good on the surface, I think a lot of what's going to happen is that a lot of people are going to be CUT OUT of eligibility, and they might start churning out new guides simply because they want to be eligible. (I know that was my first thought! :P)

     This I cannot STAND the idea of. Since when was it GOOD to encourage slipshod, sped writing? I mean, yes, we all deal with deadlines in real life, but this is eBay! We should be putting out guides that we honestly think will HELP people, not writing half-baked guides because we used all our good ideas in the first guide that is no longer eligible!! >:O

     I mean, for me, I WANT to win ANY amount of money VERY BADLY. ^^ (I don't have a lot of money IRL because I'm a poor college student, end of story.) But I write guides that I honestly hope will help people; so after the first THREE guides about My Little Pony, what else is there to cover? I talked about a basic overview of MLP, I talked about how to buy and sell MLP for beginners, and I talked about how to tell a real MLP from a fakie. In all honesty, MLP is not a HUGE market, and there's only so many people who need an MLP guide on eBay!!     

     So where does that leave me? Is eBay saying, "Way to go, thanks for using our service and writing guides! However, we're going to give multiple prizes to these other writers, because they wrote okay guides that were within the time limit, which we liked better than your in-depth but OLD guide. Buy more!"

     If that's the case, I'm very VERY peeved. >_< I mean, I was all excited about this, too!! It's not fair to exclude older guides just because they're OLD! :( If you wanna exclude some guides, wouldn't it be more fair to exclude guides that ALREADY won prize money!? >.<

     Agh. I'm sorry, I just had to vent. :( It just seems so unfair! But I guess this is what happens when our entire society is infatuated with the young and the new, rather than the old and of merit. People love things just because they're new, sometimes, and this looks to be the consumer culture that eBay is buying into.

((To anyone reading this: I'm sorry if I seemed offensive, I meant no unkindness to any of the other Guide writers. :) I sincerely wish you all the best of luck in the contest, even if I think it's being run unfairly!))