Prizes.org is a new website from Slide, a Google subsidiary, where people looking for help with a problem can utilize the time and effort of a whole crowd of people to provide them with the best solution they can think of.
In order to get help your problem or project, you simply create a contest on Prizes.org and share it with the Prizes community, as well as on Facebook and Twitter. You post a prize amount of your choosing for the winner of the contest.
People submit their solutions or work to your contest, and the winner you choose gets to take home the cash prize. Simply join Prizes.org through Facebook or Twitter to get started.
Creating a Contest
In order to create a contest, you must purchase credits for the prize you will offer. One Prize.org credit will cost you $1.00.
When you create your contest, you must clearly write a description of what you are looking for in submissions, then give the prize amount and the length the contest will be open to submissions.
Blind contests allow only the contest creator to see their submissions. Prizes.org says this is intended to cut down on copying and increase the variety in submissions.
If you feel that no contest submission really solved your problem or completed your project, you can prolong the contest at an added cost. However, if your contest has received less than 5 submissions or less than 20 votes, you can extend the contest for seven more days, free of charge.
Entering a Contest
You are only allowed to submit one entry per contest, though you can alter your entry after submission if you need to.
If the contest creator decides not to choose a winner, then the submission with the most votes is declared the winner. Prizes.org encourages their contest entrants to share the contests on Facebook and Twitter to earn the most votes possible.
You can also refer your friends and family members to enter contests. If they should win the prize, you will receive 10% of that prize as a bonus for referring people to participate in Prizes.org contests.
After you have won money, you can request payment via PayPal at any time, but you must have at least 5 Prizes credits in order to cash out.
I joined last November, great community of members but the site had major issues that were never resolved. Admin made cosmetic changes but never dealt with core issues involving fraudulent contests & contest creators, vote-spammers, default contests, reneging contest creators, stolen entries / domains by cc's and members.
Since this March, this site hit the crapper big time so it was not a surprise to get the closing announcement. According to one member on the site, it seems site admin may have used members input for developing a crowd-sourcing software program that they will sell to others. So, no further need is there for the site. They got what they wanted. Isn't that the shit?
More recently b) was a contest asking for a name for a company supplying 'innovative equipment to the bar & restaurant trade. When the 'winner' was finally selected, he turned out to be a senior member of staff of the Contest Creator and the domain name he'd submitted was bought by the firm BEFORE the contest had closed; even while genuine contestants were still wasting their time and talent submitting entries right up til the time the contest closed. Because the T&C of Prizes does not exclude participation by family & friends of Contest Creators-nothing was done to expose or penalize this pair of scammers. Meanwhile contestants who raised concerns were suspended or barred from the site. The best thing about Prizes was the sense of community support:the worst thing was the total lack of support from the Administration.
And prizes.org only ever did cosmetic repair to the beta site and did not address core issues such as fraudulent contests and contest creators and vote spamming. Members routinely found and reported the bogus contests and cc's and spammers to admin. Although some spammers were suspended, admin never did anything about the frauds. If members could figure them out, why couldn't site admin before letting the contest post?
It's rumored (on the site) that they were just using its members to beta-test a new crowd-sourcing software program that they now intend to sell and that is why the site is closing down....b/c it has served its purpose and is no longer needed. THE ONE PLUS: the great members.
Now to the ban. How do i keep this short? Frankly i was not expecting a ban, even though i was kinda expecting it. Confusing yeah. I mean i knew i had let go of the control and should not have been too surpised if i got a suspension. In fact i was expecting it since a couple of months ago. When i started really discussing hte state of affairs with people on the forums and comments. Then that scammer started winning contest after contest and people left right and centre were screaming for ssome kind of intervention and justice. Recently 7 contests were reversed from the win to the bot scammer, to others. Who is to say the new winners are genuine? Anyway. What happened is i took on teh fight with too many of the bots. 1) there was the main scammer bot of course whose every scam used to get reported by me 2) there was a mad woman called Teresa 3) Who i think was a fake account created by a guy named Ryan Turman This 3rd number fellow had allegedly stopped using Prizes few months ago because of a spat he and i had. Basically he got pwned for words and had to go away coz he had been exposed for a phoney. He used to write "over 100 winning entries" as his tagline on the site when in reality he had won only 7. So people complained (chiefly me) and prizes removed the display of JFF (just for fun, no money, casual contests for fun) and so his win count came to 7 and he could not use the tagline "over 100 winning contests" anymore. Anyway, i knew this fool was waaay too sick to just go away. Later i kept spotting people who would deliberately flame and try to start a war of words with me, without any sort of provocation. Then he went too far and abused people close to me. So i let go of all shackles and totally threw words back at them. I knew what they were doing, 6-7 of them must be in touch coordinating the whole drama, basically they started flaming me simultenously on many contests and posts and i can imagine each of them sending a message to [email protected] thus making prizes really feel as if some kind of major offender. Now all that which has happened, makes me confused as to how can prizes.org themselves be the culprit. But after the ban i could not care and i lol at them using meme trolling etc. It's not just me but a few other enlightened folk too at the site who enjoy those funny pokes.
That is besides the point though. You want to know if they are legit and if you should spend your valuable time there....right? Well you should not. If i really hated them i'd not tell you that i won around 1600 dollars there in as many contests. So yes there are genuine contest holders and genuine people win. But tehre are wayyyyyy tooooo many things they have not answered and that makes them very very vehemently the main culprit. The other possibility ais that at launch they were throwing money around like its water and i guess some people must have really taken the site for a ride and made 1000s if not 100s of dollars. Coz they were giving $100 coupons and also upgrading every 2nd contest even if they were like "name my doggy" types. So because of that there were like 200 contests on at a time nad thus many genuine contest holders and so i won a few of them and i was happy. Now they have some 35 contest and i can bet half of them are their own fake contests just to populate the site with "fake activity". But don't take my word for it. I would advise you to spend a week going to teh site from the oldest contests to now. Trust me, if you do this and then decide not to waste time there, you would only lose a week. If you go there in the present unrectified situation, you'll be wasting wayyy more than a week.