Competition: Love in Eleven Winners

A couple of weeks ago we hosted our Love in Eleven competition over on Facebook and firstly I’d like to say thank you to all who entered and apologise for the delay in announcing the results. Let me explain.

Immediately after the competition ended I announced the results in a preliminary post on Facebook as I usually do but when counting the votes I noticed that two stories in particular had many, many more votes than the others. I also noticed that one of the winning stories had quite a large typo in it. Although I thought it a little odd, I didn’t give it too much thought, you guys vote for the winners and while they aren’t always my favourites, that’s fine.

However, the next morning when I started to write up the winners’ post I noticed something else. Within 10 minutes of me putting up the results post almost 500 people had ‘unliked’ For Reading Addicts on Facebook. Shan went off to do a little investigation and we discovered that no one who had liked the two winning stories ‘liked’ the page any longer.

We understand that your friends want to support you and like your story, and we understand that, which is why we don’t put any special rules in place to prevent it. In fact I’m not even sure how we would word a rule to prevent this happening. With all the information now available to us, we had a discussion with the team and I have made the very heavy-hearted decision to disqualify the top two winners and announce three other winners. I think that having hundreds of people vote on your story and then unlike the page immediately afterwards is against the ethos of For Reading Addicts and not really what our competitions are about.

Sadly as there’s no rule I can put into place to ensure this doesn’t happen again it means that we won’t be able to hold any more competitions that rely on you guys voting. This makes me really sad because I absolutely love the creativity that comes through when we host these comps.

After the discussions with the team, here are the next three stories to get the most likes on Facebook and the three winners. No correspondence or discussion will be entered into from hereon in, my decision is final.

The winners are announced as: