Here's a contest which I personally would love even though I'd never ever win it:
Prizes for those nominated-and-voted/selected as the most helpful members on MR. Members' efforts which might be rewarded could include software creation, extensive firmware modification, ebook contributions to the Patricia Clark Library and sustained and active support on jailbreaking threads. Many of the people who do these things devote massive amounts of time to end users like me but can't even afford to buy certain of the readers they're asked repeatedly to test. In my opinion, those people make this site not only fun but
invaluable. I'd rather see those people rewarded than anyone else including myself.
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Am I alone in wanting this?: People whose join dates and sole contributions to MR involved posts solely on the last contest thread, and who have now received their prizes, to post -- here or anywhere else on the site -- about a dozen times at least just to show they really are interested in the community. The only reason I can see to condone one-sided reward-seeking is if the idea is simply to induce new members to join for the sake of numbers. (But even then, why not obligate them to contribute a bit as well?)
If new members don't contribute, and the idea wasn't simply to increase registered user numbers, then please consider this idea next time:
Limiting eligible contestants to those who joined MR
before the contest and have posted a minimum of twenty times. Many other sites do this for their contests, though in this case I've made the posting minimum lower than any I've seen.