Heavy As Hell Blog

February Contest Winners Announced! Below I have posted a screenshot of our contest winners chart. This was taken at 12:00 midnight Eastern time zone. This shows that XTRMDave has won first place. Randomnicole came in second. Nowsourcing is the official third place since me and my wife are not allowed to win by contest rules. A humble thank you to all the winners. I will contact you all to find out what version of Guitar Hero: World Tour band kit you need for your game system. Plus of course your snail mail address so I can get it to you.

A new contest (or two) will be announced on Monday! I know there are several people out there that support this site, but are still not active for some reason. They will blog about it, podcast about it, and even Twitter about it. I think I even saw a great HAH tribute site on Ning once (can’t seem to find it though). If only these people where active on the site as they are helping to get the word out we would not be struggling so much. Seriously I can only offer a humble thank you to you all for your support, but please can everyone be more active on the site as well? We have a new twist to the March contests that might encourage this activity.

In closing, March will not only be the first month we have two contests in a row but also we will run two contests simultaneously! More details will be announced on this Monday morning.

Mark Carras Heavy As Hell News

In case anyone didn’t notice, Heavy as Hell got some updates this evening! Here’s a quick rundown of the new features.

1. Automatically parse and retrieve story titles and descriptions during submissions - You know when you’re submitting and you have to fill in the title and give a description for your submission? Well now if you just want to copy paste, that’s pretty much all taken care of for you. Upon submitting a website, it should pre-populate the title and description for you. You can then either modify them to your liking, leave them as is, or if you want to enter your own, just clear the fields and enter your own. This might not work for every site, but for the majority it should.

2. Dupe Detection - Tired of seeing what is essentially the same story 5 times? Well now upon submitting a story, Heavy as Hell will search for potential duplicates as to try to lessen duplicate stories. Don’t worry if it pops up for your and your story is original, there’s a link to submit your original story instead…it’s a computer its not always perfect, but we’re trying to make it as perfect as possible.

3. Change and Canceling Your Vote - Accidentally vote a story up or down when you didn’t mean to? Well have no fear, now you can change your vote or if you want to cancel it, you can do that too. To change your vote, simply click on the opposite arrow. Cancelling your vote is done from either the story’s page or from your user profile.

4. Bands - Now bands can have their own profile unique to them. Bands can register on the site and create a profile letting users know their website, MySpace profile and more. Sorry, but as a band you can’t vote on stories, but if you want to participate as well, just create a user account! Now what do these bands mean for users? Simple, as a user, you can become a fan of the band. When you become a fan of the band, your sins transfer over to them (don’t worry, you keep them too) so try to get your favorite bands at the top of the sins list! To view what bands are registered with the site, just click the ‘Bands’ link in the category bar and you’ll be given a list of the bands registered.

As always keep enjoying the site and have fun promoting music that rocks!

If you happen to stumble across a bug, please let us know at http://www.heavyashell.com/about/bugreport

-Keith (DarkNemesis618)

Keith Wagner Heavy As Hell News, New Features heavyashell, newfeatures, socialvoter, update

Guitar Hero: World Tour giveaway contest gives in to your demands!

You now pick what game system version you win!
We are still giving away 3 Guitar Hero: World Tour packages. It is still the full “band Kit” package. However, many have said they wanted to pick the game system version after they won. Well, we have heard your cries and this is the only change to the contest. More options. So now third place is as good as first place. Are we cool now?

How you earn “points” to win:
You earns “sins” (points) for submitting links to stories about hard rock, classic rock, metal, punk, industrial, glam, goth, grunge, grindcore, hardcore, metalcore, etc. It’s not just metal! For example, we think THIS VIDEO is Heavy As Hell. Voting for stories others submit also gets you “sins”. The third method of getting “sins” is to comment on submissions others have made. Pretty much just be active on the site. The point of the site is to be social, so make sure and “friend” users with the same musical tastes as you have. Feel free to invite friends, too.

A little hint:
If someone was to just vote for every story in the upcoming section that they think deserves a vote, they could have a good chance with that alone. It’s just that easy people!

New users have a better chance than ever!
Last time we gave the prize away to the top users of all time (that were not directly connected to the site). This time we are giving the prizes away to the top 3 users of the month! We hope this makes new users feel more welcome. Honestly it doesn’t do us any good to give a prize away to someone who was really active for a few weeks, but hasn’t been to the site in 6 months. Now of course programmer DarkNemesis618, my wife VaporRub, and myself are automatically disqualified from winning (as is standard for any contest anywhere). Everyone else (within the United States) however is free game. Now we want to make sure that everyone has a good and fair chance of winning, so we are giving you until March 1st at Midnight East Coast time. This means the second the month changes, a screenshot will be taken to show the winner in a blog post the morning of March 1st. Whoever are the top 3 users win the contest.

How can you tell if you are winning?
Go to the Top Ten Users Chart link at the bottom of every page. The first chart is ranking users overall and has nothing to do with this contest. For the rest of the month, the important chart is the one below that. It’s the one that says “Top 10 Users During the Latest Contest” in big bold letters.

Winner will be announced March 1st.
Once we receive said winner’s address the “Guitar Hero: World Tour package” will be sent out to them. We are very sorry, but only winners from the United States are eligible due to legal reasons. Users worldwide are welcome to be a part of the site, but this contest has to be for U.S. residents only. Of course any user suspected of cheating, gaming the system, or being involved in activity that could harm the site or it’s users may be banned. Being banned from this site will disqualify you from this and any contest.

Only guitar based music stories win Guitar Hero prize!
So why no rap? Rap doesn’t use guitars. We are giving away a Guitar Hero: World Tour package. Not a beat box hero game. We want to celebrate people who actually play instruments. This is what we are passionate about. This site was started to talk about hard rock, classic rock, metal, punk, industrial, glam, goth, grunge, grindcore, hardcore, metalcore, etc. No rap, rapcore, dance music, techno, hip hop, or country. So we strongly discourage those styles. Before calling us racist for not liking rap, please look up the bands God Forbid, Bad Brains, Kings X, S2C, etc. To be clear, rap and techno do NOT count for this (or any) contest at this site. This has always been the case with this site and it always will be. Why? Because we are the only social news site that truly ROCKS!

It has already started!
When does the contest start? If you are reading this it already has. So CLICK HERE and get started already!

Mark Carras Heavy As Hell News Band Kit, Contest, giveaway, Guitar Hero, World Tour

So we think it is time for another contest. This time we will be giving away 3 Guitar Hero: World Tour packages. When buying these we wanted to go with the biggest and most expensive version we could find. Not saying it is the most we could have spent, just saying that as far as we could find this is the best package we found. It would be a lame contest to cut corners.

You earns “sins” (points) for submitting links to stories about hard rock, classic rock, metal, punk, industrial, glam, goth, grunge, grindcore, hardcore, metalcore, etc. Voting for stories others submit also gets you “sins” (points). The third method of getting “sins” (points) is to comment on submissions others have made. Pretty much just be active on the site. The point of the site is to be social, so make sure and “friend” users with the same musical tastes as you have. Feel free to invite friends too.

Last time we gave the prize away to the top users of all time (that were not directly connected to the site). This time we are giving the prizes away to the top 3 users of the month! We hope this makes new users feel more welcome. Honestly it doesn’t do us any good to give a prize away to someone who was really active for a few weeks, but hasn’t been to the site in 6 months. Now of course programmer DarkNemesis618, my wife VaporRub, and myself are automatically disqualified from winning (as is standard for any contest anywhere) Everyone else however is free game (Within the United States). Now we want to make sure that everyone has a good and fair chance of winning. So we are giving you until March 1st at Midnight east coast time. This means the second the month changes, a screenshot will be taken to show the winner in a blog post that morning. Whoever are the top 3 users win the contest.

How can you tell if you are winning? Go to the Top Ten Users Chart link at the bottom of every page. The first chart is ranking users overall and has nothing to do with this contest. For the next month, the important chart is the one below that. It’s the one that says “Top 10 Users During the Latest Contest” in big bold letters.

Now we have 3 of these. One for the Playstation 3, one for the Xbox360, and one for the Nintendo Wii. Whoever gets frist prize gets to pick which one they want first. Second prize gets to pick which one they want second. Third place gets whatever is left. 4th place gets nothing, but our thanks for playing. So if you get one that doesn’t fit your game system, it will be your responsibility to deal with exchanging it. Should have fought harder for the top spot.

Winner will be announced March 1st. Once we receive said winner’s address the “Guitar Hero: World Tour package” will be sent out to them. We are very sorry, but only winners from the United States are eligible due to legal reasons. Users worldwide are welcome to be a part of the site, but this contest has to be for U.S. residents only. Of course any user suspected of cheating, gaming the system, or being involved in activity that could harm the site or it’s users may be banned. Being banned from this site will disqualify you from this and any contest.

So why no rap? Rap doesn’t use guitars. We are giving away a Guitar Hero: World Tour package. Not a beat box hero game. We want to celebrate people who actually play instruments. This is what we are passionate about. This site was started to talk about hard rock, classic rock, metal, punk, industrial, glam, goth, grunge, grindcore, hardcore, metalcore, etc. No rap, rapcore, dance music, techno, hip hop, or country. So we strongly discourage those styles. Before calling us racist for not liking rap, please look up the bands God forbid, Bad Brains, Kings X, S2C, etc. To be clear, rap and techno do NOT count for this (or any) contest. This has always been the case with this site and it always will be. Why? Because we are the only social news site that truly ROCKS!

When does the contest start? If you are reading this it already has.

Mark Carras Heavy As Hell News Contest, Guitar Hero, World Tour