So I figured it was time to start making a list of the sites that have given us coverage on the site. As we update this list, it will get longer and longer. Of course with each update I will put the new stuff on top and separate it from the archive section of the post. I just want to make sure all the sites who have given us press have a chance of getting thanked by you Sinners in the special way we thank other websites. If your site has helped spread the word about this months contest, let us know and we will add you to the list.

These are our friends…let them know how we show appreciation to our friends…

http://mickieszoo.blogspot.com/2010/03/heavyashellcom-relanches.html
http://www.networkordie.com/?p=318
http://mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=127707#top
http://www.rockmymonkey.com/news/article/2010/03/HeavyAsHellcom_1000000_Giveaway_Launched
http://www.rtvchannel.tv/heavyashell-announces-its-public-launch-on-march-1-2010/ (That’s not a picture of me or anyone I know)
http://www.music-news.com/ShowNews.asp?nItemID=32748

Also, make sure you join our Facebook page HERE!

Mark Carras Heavy As Hell News coverage, link exchange, links, press, track me

Ok, so I want to see how many of you Sinners I can get to start using Twitter to get people to check out your submissions here on HeavyAsHell. So here is the deal, below I have a list of cd’s from our great sponsors. There is some pretty cool stuff in there, right? I know you want one of them. So I will be watching for people using the hash tag #heavyashell all day Tuesday March 9th. It is first come first serve. So the first ones to promote their new (as in that day) submission through Twitter with the hash tag #heavyashell get the cd’s. Cool?

So to be clear, your Twitter message needs two things. A link to your submission on this site and the hash tag #heavyashell.

I also want to make it clear that this contest is not part of the main contest. So just because you already won that contest, does not mean you can’t win this contest. You can win both contests. However, just like with the main contest, you can only win this one once.

If that doesn’t make sense just know that this contest is open to former winners too. And that with each contest on this site, you can only win once.

As with all our contests, you must be at least 18 years of age. You must also be a legal resident of the United States Of America. Both of these are for legal reasons. We encourage everyone to participate in the site. Even if they can’t be part of the contests.

So you ready for the list?

• Through The Eyes Of The Dead - Malice (2 copies)
• Beneath The Massacre - Dystopia (2 copies)
• Carving Desert Canyons - Scale The Summit (2 copies)
• All That Remains - Overcome (has no cover)
• All That Remains - Overcome
• Testament - Demonic Reissue (2 copies)
• Avantasia - Lost In Space
• Immolation - Majesty And Decay
• Annotations Of An Autopsy - II: The Reign of Darkness
• Eluveitie - Everything Remains As It Never Was
• Mnemic - Sons Of The System
• Arsis - Starve For The Devil
• Scar Symmetry - Dark Matter Dimensions
• Ex-Deo - Romulus
• Epica - Desiggn Your Universe
• Threat Signal - Vigilance
• Psychostick - Sandwich (10 copies)
• Evacuate Chicago - Veracity (10 copies)

most importantly make sure and follow both the official Heavy As Hell Twitter account and my personal account. I tend to update my own account more often.

Mark Carras Contest, Heavy As Hell News cd's, Contest, free, hash tag, Twitter

Starting at 9 am pacific (until 7 pm pacific) I will be picking one person an hour to win a
copy of the latest release from the band Mongrel. We will call this
“Mongrel Monday”.

The rules are simple. You use Twitter to encourage your
friends and fans to vote for your stories/submissions on HeavyAsHell.com. Send out
the url with the hash tag #HeavyAsHell so I can track everyone. I will pick one
person an hour and send the announcement of the winner out through the official HAH Twitter
account (not my personal one) to be sent the Mongrel cd Revenge.

As with most contests, we can only accept people who live in the United States. Sorry, but it’s a legal thing.

Never heard Mongrel before? Go to http://www.myspace.com/mongrel and
take a listen! Also make sure to thank the band for being a sponsor of this contest. They are the only unsigned band (or any band for that matter) with enough balls to do so!

This will be considered a separate “mini contest”. Which means, that winning a copy of this cd DOES NOT bar you from winning anything from the main contest at http://www.heavyashell.com/contest.

Don’t forget to folow both the official HAH twitter account at http://twitter.com/HeavyAsHell and my personal account at http://twitter.com/MarkCarras. I tend to respond from the personal one quicker. Plus I give updates more often on that one.

So how big can we make Mongrel Monday?

Mark Carras Contest, Heavy As Hell News

Who really gives a crap about the Academy awards other than people who work on movies, gay guys, women with no lives, and just plain sheep with their heads shoved so far up their backsides that they couldn’t see the light of day if their lives depended on it? Seriously, what people should have really cared about was who would win the first week of the Heavy As Hell Ten Grand Giveaway.

Well, first prize went to the fan favorite. Many people were rooting for this guy to win, so I’m glad he did. threaper13 you now get to take $1,000 of my money. So download the PDF and send it to me as soon as you can. For legal reasons I can’t send the money until we have that legal form. Second place goes to drvondoom. Since the legal limit for being forced to use that annoying form is $600 and you won $500, all I need is your real name and the street address I need to send it to. No P.O. Boxes since someone will have to sign for the package. With amounts this large we need to be able to track that it was received by the correct person. Fourth prize goes to a long time supporter of the site Mortalwind. Same rules as 2nd prize go for your $250 prize.

Can I ask a favor?
There are some that question if this contest is legit. So can I ask a huge favor of the winners? Can you pose with your prizes when you get them and send me the photo as soon as possible? We would love to feature you winners if you’re cool with it. You don’t have to, but it would really help us out.

Mark Carras Contest, Heavy As Hell News Contest, drvondoom, mortal wind, threaper13, winners

Most of you by now should know about the contest where we are giving away over $10,000 throughout the month of March. If not CLICK HERE for that info. So as we are nearing the end of the first week of the contest, a few of you wanted to know how the site is doing. So I grabbed a few screen shots to let you know. This is only after a few days. What will happen after a full month of this? That depends on you Sinners!

Google Analytics (March 4th)

We went from 654 unique visitors on average for the day to 1,033 Visits. Keep in mind that each of these ranking sites are just their guess. Google also has a thing called Page Rank. Our Page Rank as of Feb 28th is 4 out of 10. Our goal is 10, but we would be happy if we go up one point a month on that. Page Rank moves very slowly and it takes a ton of work to climb up on that.

Alexa gets a lot of flack, but honestly I find them to be just as much a guess as any of them. No more and no less. This is why we look at all of them to figure out where we stand. With this one we have a before and after.

Alexa stats for Feb 28th 2010

Alexa stats for March 4th 2010

That’s 4 days! Imagine after a full month! Now for our “in house” stats…

So what is the goal? Well, by the end of the month I would like to be in the top 100,000 on Alexa and all of the others (we didn’t mention them because they don’t even track us yet). We would like to be at 10 on Page Rank. I would like our in house stats to say over 100,000 by the end of the month. As far as Google Analytics goes, I’m just curious what it will show when we hit 100,000 unique visitors. Google Analytics are known to be overly harsh. So I care more about in house stats.

Mark Carras Heavy As Hell News, Stats alexa, Google Analytics, Page Rank, Stats, track me, Urchin stats

If you’re just now checking out the site, you might have noticed some changes! Heavy as Hell has been upgraded to version 2.0 of OpenVoter.  With this release there are plenty of new and exciting features.

1. Sharing

You can now share submissions with your friends.  Just click the share link, enter a personal note if you choose to, and click share.  Other users will now get an alert telling them to check out the submission.

2. Distinction Between Stories, Photos, & Videos

You can now submit a story, photo, or video as the actual submission, and browse by type.

3. Alerts

You can now be alerted either by e-mail, or on-site alerts, or both about new shares, comments, and private messages.  All you need to do is set your preferences in your account page. By default, alerts are only on-site.

4. Private Messaging

You can now send private messages to other users.  Just click the envelope button on the bar on the top of your screen.

5. API

Heavy as Hell now has a basic API. If you’re a developer be sure to check it out.

6. Subscriptions

You can now subscribe to comment threads to be alerted when a new comment is posted on a thread you’re subscribed to.  By default you are automatically subscribed to the thread when you submit the story or when you leave a comment, but you can change this in your account page.

7. Filters

You can now enter keywords in the filter page to hide submissions with these keywords from view. Don’t like stories on Radiohead, just add the word radiohead to the filter box and those stories will vanish from site.

8. Blocking Users

You can now block users to hide their submissions and comments from view.

9. Nested Comments

Comments and replies are now nested for easier reading.

10. General Improvements

The site has been generally improved and hopefully it shows.

Well thats a basic summary of the changes, and new features, let us know what you think and what could use improvement.

Keith Wagner Heavy As Hell News 2.0, newfeatures, openvoter

It’s been a year since the launch of Heavy as Hell using the SocialVoter CMS.  We’ve seen some active spans, and some not so active spans.  Truth be told, we like the more active time spans a lot better as more content gets submitted so we end up seeing a large range of stories of all types.

Anywho, in the next couple of months, Heavy as Hell will be getting a major overhaul complete with tons of new features and a brand new look.  The SocialVoter CMS will still be the management system behind it, but it will have a new name…OpenVoter.  I’ve been working on it steadily over the course of the past several months and hope to have it finished up in the next month.  Then it will be tested and released here for your enjoyment.  I don’t want to ruin the suprise of all the features that it includes, but suffice it to say, the number of changes and everything will make it feel like a brand new system.

In the meantime, enjoy the site, become more active, submit more stories, post more comments.  This site isn’t about us the admins, its about music, you and the community!

Keith Wagner Heavy As Hell News newversion, openvoter, socialvoter

Hey guys, if you see some spam lying around on the site, don’t just downvote it…report it so that we as the admins see it. It just takes one click.

Thank you,

Management

Keith Wagner Heavy As Hell News reporting, spam

Oh yes, the end of another contest is here. Although I loved being able to have 3 first prize winners this time, this comes with some lame news as well. It looks as though one person might have put some time into trying to win without reading the rules. Nothing sucks more than having to disqualify a user, but if I don’t it would leave another user shafted. So please know that we here at HAH debated and discussed this endlessly. We did not make this discussion lightly and we know that there could be repercussions for us. So here is the deal…

The winners are “noneck”, “XTRMDave”, & “mcphranklee”. User “Metalgasm” is a user we wish could be a winner, but he is from Canada. Now of course we have no problem with our metal brothers and sisters way up north. They gave us Devin Townsend! Our rules however clearly state that “We are very sorry, but only winners from the United States are eligible due to legal reasons.” Now without going into some big debate on this, you have to understand that we are a very tiny company. We don’t have the funds to pay lawyers to find out what we can do over international borders and what we can’t. So we have to play it safe. However, I have an offer that I hope will make Metalgasm feel he is still welcome here at HAH. Get me your address and I will send you a small stack of cd’s to add to your collection. This is out of my own personal stash. Now this is not something I can do all the time, but I have a ton of cd’s and might feel presured into doing it whenever a user puts in the effort Metalgasm has. Cool? I hope so. The last thing I want is for our international users to feel unwelcome. We love you all. We just can’t afford to include you in any official contests. As you can probably tell, we feel pretty bad about that.

So the three winners mentioned above will be sent an email asking them to get us their snail mail address. As soon as we have that the packages will be sent out. A new contest will be launched soon as well. As always, if you have any idea on what prizes we should giveaway post them in the comments. The only rules for contests is that they be something very recently released, something a wide range of people will want, and something within our $100 per month prize budget. That’s a maximum! We have found that it doesn’t matter how much we spend on the prize. It only matters if we can figure out what you users want the most. So that is what we will try to do. Thanks everyone. Vote up the good stuff with the passion only Hard Rock, metal, and punk fans can!

Mark Carras Contest, Heavy As Hell News

This contest is over. Winners will be announced within 24 hours and a new contest shortly after that. Stay tuned!

This week we are going to try something different. This time we are going to give away 3 first prizes! We have three sampler cd’s from the new Jane’s Addiction box set A Cabinet Of Curiosities. One of them could be yours!

Details on the prize:

A Cabinet of Curiosities is a compilation box set by alternative rock band Jane’s Addiction, released on April 21, 2009 on Rhino Records. The collection includes three discs of demos, rehearsals, remixes, covers, and live recordings from the groups initial lifespan of 1986–1991, and one DVD featuring the movie Soul Kiss, the band’s music videos, and concert footage.

This very rare sampler of Jane’s Addiction’s first ever boxed set contains rare demos of “Mountain Song” and “Stop!,” an amped up remix of “Been Caught Stealing,” a rambling live clip of “LA Woman” that could raise Jim from the dead and more.

Sampler includes:
Mountain Song (Radio Tokyo Demo)
Up The Beach (Demo)
Stop! (Demo)
No One’s Leaving (Demo)
Been Caught Stealing (12” Remix)
Ripple
L.A. Medley (Live)
1% (Live)
Ain’t No Right (Live)
Ocean Size (Live)

Details on the contest:

How you earn “points” to win:
As always, you earn “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 along with stuff about Jane’s Addiction. 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. To get votes on your submissions feel free to recruit on metal forums, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, or wherever else.

Four Hints on how to win:

• 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. In fact one of the people that almost won recently got almost every single “sin” for voting alone. It’s just that easy, people!
• Voting for other people’s stories can only help your chances of winning.
• If you don’t vote for other people’s stories it can really hurt your chances in this contest.
• Voting down spam (Viagra or anything else non-music related) gets you votes, too! The whole point of the site is that everyone is a moderator.

The first user chart means nothing:
We used to give the prize away to the top users of all time. Now it is all about who is the top user of the week, so unless you are currently involved we don’t care. I know that’s harsh, but this site needs active users! So that first chart means nothing really. Eventually we will give the Top Users Of The Month/Week/Day charts their own page, but until then please scroll down to the chart that counts most! We hope this makes new users feel more welcome. We are all about new users!

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. 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 Monday May 25th.
Once we receive the address of the 3 winners the prizes 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.

18 years or older please.
Now there is no way for us to check this at all, but for legal reasons we have to say that you must be 18 years old to win the contest. Why? Because if some kid wins and his parents get all pissy with us, we can say it was against the rules for the kid to have entered the contest in the first place. So if you are below 18, please be honest and let us know so we can give the prize to someone who is over 18. No ID check though, because we can’t think of a way to pull that off.

We still only want guitar based music!
So why no rap? Rap doesn’t use guitars! 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, pop, or country. So we strongly discourage those styles. We are not big fans of Emo either, but that’s a whole different subject. Now before thinking there are racial reasons for us not liking rap, please look up the bands God Forbid, Bad Brains, Kings X, & S2C. I’m pretty sure the admins of this site have not only voted up stories of black artists on this site, but submitted them as well. It’s not about color, it’s about the music! Play an instrument or go away!

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. Users earn points for down voting stories about rap, rapcore, dance music, techno, hip hop, pop, or country as well since it is looked at as spam.

The contest 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 Contest, Heavy As Hell News