fantanoice said:
I think we all agree on this. And even if I won, its not something I'd ever want to do again.
And I'm not sure of what you mean by ugly side. The whole point of this contest was to reach the 100,000 posts. Yes there were other, better, ways to do this, but that doesn't mean we won't be using any of those. It was just for 3 weeks.
Also all the spam was moved by DS, so there will be no lasting effect.
Another thing is that most the "spam" were actually conversations. Conversations that, while having gone off-topic at some point, were still on the same subject. I personally found them pretty entertaining. And seriously I doubt there is a forum out there where topics never stray.
And yes, this contest shouldn't be repeated again. But this contest had a goal, and once the goal was reached the competition also stopped.
One other thing I'd like to share is that while my main motivation was the contest, it wasn't the prize. I invested like 20 hours in a contest where the first prize had a value of $60. If you keep in mind that I don't usually work for less than $20 per hour, I could have easily made much more by doing something else like writing articles and earned much more.
