Welcome to The HP4GU Weekly Contest, known also by its full name:  The Invitational, Magical, Exciting, Weekly, All-Smarty’s Tournament Extraordinaire!  In order to make HP4GU a more fun and exciting home, especially for those of us who have absolutely no lives outside of it, I have (with the Moderators’ permission) decided to inflict upon you a weekly, non-competitive yet  hopefully amusing, contest.

This contest will consist of a variety of different activities which I think you will all enjoy.  Some of the contests will be written or designed by me, but I am hoping that the rest of you will contribute puzzles or contest ideas as well.  All contest ideas should be sent to the contest email address, which is HP4GUCon@aol.com.  Remember, the contest is non-competitive, so there are no winners or losers (well, no winners anyway).

There will be a new contest every week, I hope, or almost every week, anyway.  There will be 3 types of contests: puzzles, creative contests, and speculative contests.  Puzzles consist of crosswords and other word puzzles, anagrams, trivia questions, etc., so if you’ve written one of these please send it to me!  Creative contests will consist of things like poetry-writing (more fun than you think, really!).  Speculative contests will consist of asking people to theorize about an unknown aspect of the Harry Potter universe, such as the recent thread on  “What happens to the Hogwarts Express the rest of the year?”

This contest is for fun only.  There are no winners, no prizes, no trophies, no glory, but also no losers, no shame, and no hurt feelings.  Friends don’t need to compete with one another, right?  Right!  And don’t forget to send those lists of trivia questions, word search puzzles, or other brilliant ideas to me at HP4GUCon@aol.com

The Rules are posted below, and will be repeated each week when a new contest is posted.  I will also file the rules in our files section, along with a contest archives (space permitting).  The first contest will be posted this Friday.

1.  Contest responses should be sent by email to the contest email address, which is HP4GUCon@aol.com.  RESPONSES SHOULD NOT BE POSTED TO THE LIST.  Anyone posting responses, especially puzzle answers, to the list will be disqualified from participation in that contest, sent a howler, turned into a toad, sent to Azkaban, AND forced to eat bubotuber pus. SO DON’T POST RESPONSES TO THE LIST.

2.  Contests will be posted on Fridays.  Responses should be sent by email to HP4GUCon@aol.com by midnight Tuesday night (EST).  For puzzle contests, both the correct answers and a list of everyone who submitted a correct solution by the deadline will be posted on Wednesday (or Thursday at the latest).  For creative and speculative contests, all responses will be posted, although I might just post a random sampling if there are a real lot of responses to a particular contest.

3. ANSWERS SHOULD NOT BE POSTED TO THE LIST.  I know this is also rule # 1, but I can not stress it enough.

– Joywitch M. Curmudgeon

P.S.  There is a little tiny contest imbedded in this post.  Did you find it?