Young House Love, slowly dying home improvement diary blog thing site, has decided to try and reinvigorate their readers’ interest by launching a forum for their site. Users are informed that:

Our aim is to make Young House Love Forums a helpful, fun, and happy place. There are plenty of sites to get your snark on, but this little slice of the internet is meant to be a positive, encouraging spot to share tips and advice, ask questions, and lift each other up.

With community goals like that perhaps they should partner with Bloggers Anonymous. Anyway, since its launch the YHL forum has rapidly filled up with gripping topics such as “How did you find YHL? How long have you been reading?” and “How do you grow readership for your blog?” as well as half a dozen threads asking how to paint Ikea cabinets.

Yes, the YHLF will finally fill the internet void created by the lack of home improvement forums…oh wait. Well, if nothing else readers always appreciate it when you provide them a new place to spam their own blog url, right?

Megan, of “Honey We’re Home”, finds email such a major stressor in her life that she took a brave step this weekend.

On Saturday morning, I had 980 emails in my Honey We’re Home inbox.  Seriously, I really needed to get control of those emails.  They are a combination of all the comments that come via email, reader questions that I need to respond to, advertising inquiries, press releases, and spam/junk that have built up over the last several months.

So, I did something radical.  I deleted. them. all.  In a matter of seconds, my email inbox was empty.  I want to respond directly to all reader emails, but right now, I just can’t do it… I don’t think there were too many reader emails that I hadn’t responded to, but if I didn’t get to yours, I apologize and hope you understand.

So…is this a thing now? Is it now acceptable to tell your readers “hey sorry but I hit delete all and didn’t reply to your emails, sorry, lylas!” and have them still respond with fawning comments about how awesome you are? Personally if I  had taken the time to email a blog I enjoyed and then saw a post informing me that my email was about as important as retail spam, I’d probably be making a WTF? face for an hour.

I mean, I think most of us know that when we email someone we may or may not get a response because people have lives and jobs etc., and sometimes things don’t get read right away. Fine. But announcing that you just deleted their “comments” and “questions” en masse because you are just so stressed out from your inbox doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that should be announced to your readers publicly on your blog.

Bri Emery, of some Designlovefest blog, announced last week that she would be having her “biggest giveaway yet”. The items, totalling over $2,400 dollars, would include “one free spot to blogshop – you can redeem your golden ticket in the city of your choice”, a copy of Photoshop, and a bunch of the usual random blogger giveaway stuff – a book, a scarf, a backpack, a gold iPhone case. Bri told her readers:

we’ll be choosing one random winner on tuesday, august 28th at 10am PST. make sure you leave a way I can reach ya if you win!

Unfortunately when Bri announced the winner, it became clear that it was in fact NOT a “random” winner – the chosen one Taylor also submitted a blog post complete with video detailing “how much I want this”. Bri’s commenters quickly called her on the perceived unfairness of how the winner was actually chosen:

“Seriously love your blog and your creative talent. Never in a million years did I think I would win this giveaway, but didn’t you say the winner would be random? If you’re holding a creative-entry style contest – just say!”

“I thought you said the winner would be chosen at random, so I just have to mention it…and I totally agree that if it was meant to be based on whose entry was the most creative, we should have known that ahead of time so we could get our creativity ON!”

“Bri, I just now saw your response to the question about the winner. I’m sorry, but that’s really disappointing to me. You could have called out her entry and given her some blog-love, but you did say the winner was going to be random.”

Bri’s response was basically a variation of “I’m sorry you’re offended”:

i am sorry you feel like that, it was not the intention. like i said, i thought it was notable that she did go above and beyond without being told, plus entered in multiple ways. we will definitely be having more contests like this in the future. a creative contest sounds fun. let’s not rain on taylor’s parade, please! thanks everyone 🙂

Commenters continued to say they felt “mislead” by the contest rules despite Bri editing her post to add:

update: i deeply apologize for my mistake here, i’m human and i made an error. i hear all of your comments and i’m doing everything i can to fix this. i announced one more free spot to blogshop on my facebook page. thank you so much for understanding. -bri

I’ve long been suspicious about how “random” blog giveaway winners are actually chosen. Unless the blogger  posts the actual randomizer result screenshot in the winner announcement I always assume they pretty much chose someone they liked. Frankly I’m surprised there are not actual rules in place about these giveaways – bloggers are supposed to disclose c/o items and advertisers, so why aren’t there universal guidelines in place for what is essentially a lottery? Until there is, things like this will keep happening in blogland.