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SweepsGoat.com will be unavailable from approximately 11:00 p.m. CT June 23, 2008, through 1:00 a.m. CT June 24, 2008, while we make a few security patches. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Update (6/24/08 12:56 a.m. CT): The maintenance is complete. Here are the changes you may notice:

• If you've never listed a sweepstakes on SweepsGoat.com, your first listing must now be approved by a moderator before it appears on the site. This is intended to decrease spam listings.
• Newly-registered users must go through an email activation step before they can log in to the site. This is intended to cut down on automated registrations.
• The login/register functions are now located only at the top of each page (not also on the sidebar).

If you see anything that doesn't appear to be working correctly, please contact us with details of the problem.

Today's the beginning of one of the most popular sweepstakes around -- HGTV's Dream Home Sweepstakes. It's a highly-promoted, well-run sweepstakes, and features like their home tour make it fun to imagine winning the prize and living in the home. Of course, most of the Dream Home winners choose to sell the homes because of taxes. In fact, just last month, the 2005 winner announced he was foreclosing on his home. But a sweeper can always dream, right?

In other recent sweepstakes news:

• Club Libby Lu has chosen not to award Hannah Montana tickets to the 6-year-old Texas girl whose winning essay falsely claimed her father died in Iraq.


• Ever wondered whether decorating your mail-in entries really gives you an edge? Maybe some places, but as this blogger explains, it's usually just entertainment for the data entry worker.

Just wanted to let you know we made a few minor tweaks to the SweepsGoat layout today:

• We changed the "Direct Link" label to say "Entry Form" and moved it to a more prominent position in each sweepstakes listing. We hope this will make it clearer to new visitors where they need to go to enter the sweepstakes.
• We added commas between tags on each sweepstakes's tag listing to help with readability.
• We added wording on the user registration page to indicate that the username is publicly visible, but the email address is not.
• We removed "karma" from the user's stats page, since we're not measuring karma.

And now back to your regularly-scheduled sweepstakes-entering... Thanks for using SweepsGoat.com!

A car dealer has decided to offer a new sweepstakes after a printing error in the original sweepstakes made every game piece a $1000 grand prize winner.

From the news story on Business Wire:

Jim Fitzpatrick of Atlanta-based Force Media Group said a printing mistake made every recipient of 30,000 direct mail promotional game pieces a $1,000 winner because all the "scratch-offs" covered over a prize. As indicated on the mailing, only one grand prize of $1000 was to be awarded out of the 50,000 mailings. The town of Roswell, N.M., site of the dealership, was overrun for the last two days by consumers who thought that they had won $1,000. Another 20,000 of the erroneous flyers were stopped at the post office when Force Media realized the error.

It's nice that the dealer is trying to make up for the mistake, but I still wouldn't have wanted to be one of the disappointed "winners." Guess there's a good reason for all those disclaimers you see in sweepstakes rules!

Just a quick note about a small change over on SweepsGoat: We're now highlighting the expiration dates for anything ending in the next 24 hours. These "ending soon" sweeps will have their end dates highlighted in bright yellow, so you know you need to enter them ASAP.

When I posted the Fantastic Four movie sweepstakes the other day, I thought it was a little -- odd -- that they would claim their special "Silver Surfer" quarters were legal tender. The U.S. Mint thought it was as well:

The U.S. Mint said in a news release Friday that it learned of the promotional quarter this week and advised the studio and The Franklin Mint they were breaking the law. It is illegal to turn a coin into an advertising vehicle, and violators can face a fine.

If you find one of these quarters you might want to hang on to it. It could be a valuable collector's item -- or evidence in a lawsuit.