Most scary was watching the comments on HackaADay, where people acted like Sparkfun owed them something, being really pi**ed off because they couldn't make it to the website, having forgotten this hole promotion's idea was to stresstest Sparkfun's new servers.
By the way, I got the impression that many of the people posting comments on HaD have serious problems...
Nevertheless, congratulations to the lucky Arduino-Forum users wo made it and have fun with your new stuff!
Agreed. I tried and failed but I am not unhappy. The idea also provided tham with a hell of a lot of advertising.
I will be buying my stuff from them still, just going to wait a few weeks for them to have cleared out the >1000 orders they currently have to process...
I like how were making up stuff to defend them, like
"it was all for advertising" or "server stress test", yea their post says that after about a page n a half, but here is the main reason they are still publishing
"First and foremost, we want to give back. We've had a stellar year in 2009, and it's all because of you. So please, have a beer (or a Stepper Motor Driver) on us."
another success story thanks to Sparkfun's total lack of effort to even try and make this a fair event, who the hell ask's for people to use the honer system on the internet?
Was running scripts hard against the site trying to checkout a whole bunch of baskets. In the end, got five orders through – mostly Arduino.
Not sure what the hell an Arduino is, but looking forward to making $500 on EBay XD
Very true, it could be that the "whole promotion idea" has indeed turned into a "hole promotion idea".
@Grumpy_Mike: ;D Great typo, thanks for finding it...
@Osgeld: You don't believe the quote you posted, do you? If I had wanted to p*ss off those HaD-comment-writing-morons, that's exactly what I would have written. Sounds a bit far-fetched...
Anyway, come on guys. I had not seen those comments cos I did not go looking.
You didn't manage and neither did me or a whole load of other people but it doesn't really matter. Just forget it ever happened and carry on with life,
I was sitting on a fairly fast Internet connection at work. Sparkfun's server could even be pinged -- let along answer an httpd request. I bought a couple things that I really wanted for a project a couple days before free day. I halfway expected the nightmare that the free day became. So, I'm happy my order shipped before free day started. I have to agree with one of the first posters -- this was an epic fail. A good chunk of the $100k was probably given to script kiddies who will try to eBay the goods. What goodwill does that create? To me, it was a waste of time. Sparkfun can choose to do what they want. They otherwise seem to provide good service -- so, I won't stop buying from them. But, the whole thing left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
I dunno about "good service" every single order I ever place required a phone call 4-5 days later asking if they could bother to ship it, and I have been generally avoiding sparkfun well before free day cause of it too
Doesn't matter, there is others that offer most of the same stuff for fair or better prices, and places like seeed studios or the maker shed are almost always same day shipping (within reasonable time limits of course) ... at least the couple times I have ordered from those places
