Hi Z_Bop!
That is totally aceptable my friend, thanks for letting us know about your opinion and position. And you have all the right to take that position.
I'm only posting because I should do my best to ensure all the other members that they should keep participating in the contest. Please allow me to do that without taking it personally, as it is not personal at all. This is not a reply to you, so please don't take it as if it was. From now on I'm writing only to other users of the forum who still consider to participate in our contests. I may refer to the sad situation where you were involved in, but it's just to give explanations for them and not for you. Please understand this.
In the contest rules we state that we are responsible for sending out the seeds within 30 days of the announcement of the winners. We always accomplished to send the prizes within that time limit. This is the first time it happens. If any other winner of a prize on our contests was sent the seeds after 30 days within the announcement please say it in this thread. Maybe we were unlucky, and by the first time we failed, we were unlucky enough to not be forgiven. But we accept, the participant of the contest is totally right and absolutely entitled to decide in this way.
Now, considering that I totally accept the blame and that it was me who failed, I also want to explain why this happened this time. Not to show that I'm not to blame, but to try and attenuate it a bit, for the ones who are more understanding.
As many of the AFN users know, we've been in this forum for good while and in the first 2 years we could not do any contest here because as a seedbank who respects the law, we can't send seeds to Canada and USA (right now if you check our official website and shop you'll see that we only sell seeds to some European countries to where we can legally send them). After a lot of users suggested that we should do something at AFN, we tried our best and we found a shop in Canada that could collaborate with us and send prizes to the winners if we did a contest. So, we decided to try and do it.
When that shop orders seeds from us (which we don't send to Canada, they order them to another shop in Europe and then, somehow, they get them to Canada), we also send some packs for the contest stock. But they only order seeds from us 2 or 3 times per year. This is why our stock for winners from Canada and the USA is so limited. I've been trying my best so that Sweet Seeds sends more seeds (and more strains) to them, so that the stock is bigger and with more variety. But I work from home (I don't even live in the same country where Sweet Seeds works) and I have no power to make decisions, I can only suggest and send requests.
But, besides the stock and short list of strains issue, we depend on the Canadian shop to make the seeds arrive to the winners. We supposed that a 30 day time would be enough. And it has been, except on this case.
Within the last 30 days, I've been almost one week off because of Spannabis Barcelona. Then, the person from the Canadian shop who collaborates with us took a 14 day vacation and I was not warned about it. I only knew he was in vacations when I sent him the details for delivery of the prizes and I got an automatic email saying that he was out of the office and would only return 12 days later.
When I managed to get in contact with him (by the 22nd of March, 10 days within the timing mentioned in the rules), I thought he would send the seeds right away, as usual. But I think he had a lot of accumulated work and so he only got back to me by the 30th of March to tell me that all the prizes were sent except for 1 because he ran out of stock of Blow Mind Auto, so the winner would have to choose other strain.
So, yesterday, the 1st of April, in the morning, I sent this email to the affected winner:
Cheers my friend!
Your seeds should have been sent 1 week ago but only now I was told it is in standby because our Canadian distributor ran out of Blow Mind Auto. You would have to change it for other strain.
I'm so very sorry about that. Please get back to me when possible.
Kind regards,
tommy
On a different note, I could say that the winners were announced precisely 30 days ago (by the 2nd of March, see first place of this thread) and that we could have sent the prize to this winner yesterday (on time) if he said something like "Ok, instead of Blow Mind Auto I want this other strain". But since he was only interested in Blow Mind Auto and politely decided to give up on the prize, we couldn't try to do it on time.
If this unique situation was to happen to you and you were willing to choose a different strain, you would receive your prize, as everyone else always did. Maybe (and very probably, I have to admit) we wouldn't be able to do it on time anyway, as it does not depend only on us as I previously explained, but we could have tried.
So, I hope that this single situation does not make the users of this forum to stop participating in our contest.
We actually have plans to start a much better contest than this one after the summer and I'm sure that if we go forward with it, the organization standards will be much higher.
In the meanwhile from now on I'm changing the post of the contest rules of the next months and instead of 30 days I will change to 45 days. I really wasn't expecting that that first time it happens we wouldn't have a second opportunity, but I'll learn from it and make the eventual changes to the rules to avoid this from happening again.
Thanks again for your time and understanding. Kind regards,
tommy
