Freebies and free stuff

With the 2009 NFL regular season coming to an anti-climatic close yester-yesterday (I wanted more crazy playoff scenarios!), the 2009 Fall HIF Contests comes to an end.

Overall Standings

Group 1 (ID# 33386) Winner – NCRod, 131 points
Group 2 (ID# 33727) Winner – myway, 131 points
Group 3 (ID# 34409) Winner – johnnywinwin, 135 points
Group 4 (ID# 35625) Winner – flippinfun, 129 points
Group 5 (ID# 37032) Winner – NFL1000, 130 points
Group 6 (ID# 39259) Winner – Spyder, 134 points

Prize Winners
1st Place Winner ($50 giftcard): johnnywinwin
2nd Place Winner ($25 giftcard): Spyder
Random Winner¹ ($25 giftcard): Green and Gold

So congratulations are in order! Unfortunately, johnnywinwin and Green and Gold decided not to show their e-mail addresses to me on Yahoo, so I’ll need you both to comment on your group message board and leave an e-mail that I can contact you at.

Thanks again to everybody who participated and we’ll certainly be doing this again next year!

1. As selected by Random.org from any member that participated every week. Random.org gave me Group 4, Standing 3, which was Green and Gold. [↩]

The first December 2009 contest wrapped up last night and this morning I used Random.org to pull out four random winners for the $25 Starbucks giftcards:

• Jenna K.
• Rhonda A.
• Ashley ?
• Susan C.

So congratulations! You four have e-mails from me in your inbox and I’d like to thank everybody who entered into the contest. If you notice, I called this the first December contest and that’s because the next one will start later this week. If you didn’t win this time, there’s nothing stopping you from winning the next one!

Just a friendly heads up that the current contest for four Hiffers to win $25 Starbucks giftcards ends tonight at midnight. If you haven’t already made your submission, you might want to go ahead and do so!

Seeing as how the college football season is over (sure would be nice if they had a playoff system…), the first batch of winners for the 2009 Fall HIF Contest are in! To see how the final rankings stack up, meet me after the jump. And don’t forget, the current contest for four $25 Starbucks giftcards ends soon!

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I don’t know about you, but I hate cold weather. It’s too … cold! So, since we’re in the middle of a freebie drought, I thought I’d start a contest and give away four free $25 Starbucks giftcards to warm us up!

You can have up to five different entries into the contest. They are:

• Become a fan of HIF on Facebook.
• Subscribe to our RSS feed.
• Subscribe to our daily newsletter.
• Follow HIF and/or Goob on Twitter. You’ll get one submission for each follow!

Once you’ve completed your entries, fill out the form below and you’ll be set! However, please note that you can only fill out the form once, so make sure you’ve completed all of the entries you wish to make before submitting it.

The contest ends at 11:59 PM EST on Tuesday, December 8, 2009. Winners will be selected at random via Random.org and will be announced on our Freebie Contest Winners page the next day. To enter, fill out the form below! If for some reason, you can’t see the form, here is a direct link. Good luck!

With the NFL and NCAA football seasons starting just around the corner, it’s time to get ready for the Fall 2009 Contests. Like last year, we’re holding a pick’em contest for both leagues over on Yahoo. To play, use the links below and click the “Join Group” button. From there, enter the following info:¹

Pro Football Pick’em
Group ID#: 33386 This group is now full
Group ID#: 33727 This group is now full
Group ID#: 34409 This group is now full
Group ID#: 35625 This group is now full
Group ID#: 37032 This group is now full
Group ID#: 39259
Password: freebies

College Football Pick’em
Group ID#: 15744 This group is now full
Group ID#: 16111 This group is now full
Group ID#: 17022 This group is now full
Group ID#: 18065
Password: freebies

Both leagues will be using the spread and will drop your lowest week’s score. So if you forget to make your picks once or happen to have an especially bad week, you can still possibly win! If you’re still not sure how to play, check out Goob’s Guide to Gambling that I wrote last year.

Oh yeah, prizes! The following applies for both the college and pro leagues, so if you play in both, you double your chances of winning!

1st place: $50 giftcard to your store of choice.
2nd place: $25 giftcard to your store of choice.
Random winner² : $25 giftcard to your store of choice.

And if you feel so inclined, come talk some smack with us on the forums!³

1. There’s a 50 person limit to each group, so I’ll just keep making more groups as they fill up. Clearly, you should only join one group per league! Cheaters will be deleted! [↩]
2. Must participate in all weeks in order to be eligible for the random winner prize [↩]
3. Is anybody even reading this fine print? [↩]

Before we get to the good stuff, I want to ask a quick question: does the site look okay in your browser? I spent all day ignoring a million other pressing needs in my life in an effort to tweak the site and make it a little faster. I cleaned up a ton of old code and the site should look just like it did yesterday, but before I go any further with it, I want to make sure I didn’t unknowingly break something.

And with that, thanks goes out to everybody who participated in the Teenormous t-shirts July HIF contest. I had fun going through the comments and reading everybody’s favorite freebie. The winning comment number belonged to Sandy, whose husband will soon be rocking out a wicked Metallica t-shirt.

Thanks again for participating and the next contest shall start shortly!

The good folks over at Teenormous t-shirts have offered to give any t-shirt found on their site worth up to $25 to a lucky reader here on HIF. In order to enter, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post and tell me about your favorite freebie you’ve gotten thanks to HIF. Was it an in-store offer? One you signed up for? A coupon? It doesn’t matter, just let me know which it was and how much you enjoyed it! Entries close at 12:01am on August 1st and the winner will be announced that morning.

In case you’ve never been to their site, Teenormous is essentially a search engine for t-shirts and with over 70,000 t-shirts in their database, it’s pretty safe to assume anybody would be able to find a t-shirt they liked there!

Also, I’ve put together a HIF Contest Winners page and linked to it down on the sidebar.

Just a reminder that you only have a few days left to take the super-short HIF user survey and be entered to win one of two $25 gift cards. A few thousand Hiffers have taken the quiz as of today, so if you haven’t, what are you waiting for?!

The May HIF survey was of immense help to me. I’m still in the process of setting up some new features thanks to the responses I received in it, but I thought I should go ahead and roll out another survey. In fact, since I figure to use surveys to help improve HIF over the next few months, I went ahead and bought a professional license with Survey Monkey. Not only is their software easier for me to work with, but it doesn’t have any annoying glitches like the previous survey had.

The previous survey was focused on improving HIF through certain settings and surfing habits. This survey is more focused on you, the reader. All questions on the second page are optional, but will help in finding new freebie offers. To protect privacy, the only identifying feature needed is an e-mail address (feel free to use your “freebie” e-mail address) and the entire e-mail results field will be deleted altogether once prize winners have been selected. Furthermore, IP addresses are not being logged nor kept in any way.

As for the prizes, I’m giving away two $25 gift cards again! Like before, the winners will be able to choose which store (Walmart, Amazon.com, etc.) the gift cards are for. The survey will close at noon on July 1st, so you have a little over a week to answer a dozen or so questions. Shouldn’t be too hard

So please go take the current HIF user survey and feel free to leave any questions in the comments.