Sweeps that irritate and bore

[alligatorgar]

I think the HGTV and DIY are the worst. They run a long time and just take too much time to enter. Runner up for me are the silly instant win sweepstakes that have some kind of 'game of chance' thing that is totally rigged.

[SweepstakesNinja]

Hmm, interesting, thanks.

I put them in there because the potential prize value was pretty good (some 'houses' are being given away), so figured for the chance to win a house, might be worth it.
But thanks for the feedback.

Johnathan

[alligatorgar]

I enter them all because the prizes are so good but they just bore me to tears. Same thing for sweeps that make you enter the same long screen of info for months on end.

If I was a hacker those sweeps that have you play a 'game' would be so easy. They have to download the win/lose values as part of the data and one could just make sure the data sent back had a winner even if the they did not give you one as part of the 'chance'.

[alligatorgar]

PS. I wrote code for mainframes for over 40 years at the machine language level.

[SweepstakesNinja]

Hmm... I'll see if I can figure out a way for the software to remember those long forms then... (yes, I can appreciate the boredom )

And cool... I've written for mainframes as well using good 'ol JCL... Were you using that, or fortran/cobol, or something along those lines?

Johnathan

[alligatorgar]

I got my start way back in 1974 writing Assembler for Blue Cross/Blue Shield. In those days the computer was about as powerful as today's wrist watch. My favorite machine instruction was 'backspace card punch'.

[alligatorgar]

Do you code in modules or sub-routines. By this I mean, say those great prize but annoying sweeps like the HGTV ones?

I would do a check and if it returned HGTV I would branch to a routine that does those sweeps in particular. Same for other almost constant sweeps that are a bit complicated.

[SweepstakesNinja]

A lot of the coding is quite complex, since almost every single sweepstakes is unique... 'generalizing' it (in order to have an applicable solution) that works for the majority of sweepstakes has been a bit of challenge... but seems to be getting there! And I do both (modules & subroutines). Depends on what is necessary...