When I was in elementary school, my family moved into a new home. I remember the first month watching my parents work furiously as they unpacked boxes, moved furniture, and organized new rooms.
Then they began to paint some of the new rooms. Wanting to lend a hand and having not been given many responsibilities, I decided to take it upon myself to try and paint my room. I closed my door and dove right in. I couldn’t wait to see the look on my parent’s face when they saw the initiative I was taking; it was going to be a surprise, and they were going to be so thrilled.
Twenty minutes into it, my mother came knocking. I opened the door, showing her the progress I had made in such a short period of time. The look of horror on her face when I yelled “surprise!” wasn’t quite what I was expecting.
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Update 11/26: We’ve resolved a large majority of the issues that arose during launch last Wednesday. If you still might be experiencing issues, please email me at greg@rafflecopter.com and we’ll get it straightened out :)
Yesterday morning, we had planned to surprise everyone with some new features and upgrades that we’ve been building for the past several months. The transition of upgrading our site was supposed to go smooth and changes were supposed to largely go unnoticed. We had hoped the updates would be a delightful surprise. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case.
Three bugs were introduced that we didn’t catch during our beta testing.
First, if you had a ‘leave the blog post comment’ entry option in your giveaway, or a choose your own task entry option with some text in the ‘extra info’ field, the instructions text that you created for this entry option went blank. A bug was introduced that made it so that this information wouldn’t render appear to both your entrants in the widget and you when editing the giveaway.
This information never deleted, only misplaced. As of last night, this bug has been resolved and your instructions should be back in place. If you updated your entry options yesterday, those directions will remain there.
Second, we’ve introduced a new way of downloading and viewing your entries that will be much more efficient than the old way when it’s working properly. However, a bug formed that’s not allowing folks to access these features.
Viewing your entrants on the moderate page and downloading them into a spreadsheet is a core function of Rafflecopter that we wouldn’t take away. The bugs not allowing these features to function is due to the bug. You will still be able to download all your entries and view all your entrants just like you had prior to this update when this is fixed.
Third, we released a feature that makes it really easy to add prize images into your giveaway. In order to make this function properly, we had to take away the ability of allowing HTML in the prize title.
However, the images that you had put into your Rafflecopter widget prior to this update should have remained in your giveaways. Unfortunately, when the updates were released, these images were turned into the raw HTML code. It’s almost as if the clock struck midnight and your widget became ugly.
Compounded by these issues above, communication of the updates were handled poorly and many folks are now under the impression that you cannot use Rafflecopter without paying. With some of the features not working properly, I can see where this confusion comes from. However, this isn’t the case.
In reality, we only expect a small percentage of folks to upgrade to the premium version. Regardless if you upgrade to a premium package or not, we plan on supporting everyone that uses Rafflecopter just as we have for the last year and a half.
Having said that, the support you received over the past 24 hours has been crap. You can blame that on me. We’ve always believed in providing great customer support, and while it’s been tough giving everyone one on one support they deserve, so much was happening yesterday that we completely dropped the ball.
There are still some lingering issues that we’ll be looking at throughout the day. If you’re still facing any issues at all, please email us at support@rafflecopter.com with any details that you can provide. If you have sent us a message already and haven’t gotten a response yet, we promise to make our best attempt to get your questions answered and issues resolved. Thanks for your patience!
When these bugs are fixed and updates are complete, we’re confident these new features and functionality are going to make your giveaways much smoother and easier.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Greg, JR, and Justin
The Rafflecopter Team
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