Oh Steam…

Kubrick twist: Searching Steam aliases is notoriously broken! This seems to be a known issue that’s been causing consternation for half a decade. Specifically, aliases with trailing numbers (e.g. spacetoast123) are unfindable with the exact string, and usually with a partial string.

So, while I’ve been able to send a friend request to the Second Prize raffle winner ($25 USD), who has no trailing numbers, nothing I’ve tried has brought up profiles for the First and Third Prize winners ($75 and $25, respectively).

If you entered the raffle, and your Steam alias ends in numbers, please friend me via my public profile page: https://steamcommunity.com/id/rhinocrate/ Over 300 hours of Civilization VI? Yes, it’s a problem. Regardless, you may have already won! I promised not to post handles publicly (and creating a duplicate with the same alias seems quite easy) so winners can’t be directly announced.

Bottom line: If you ever run a stunt like this yourself, even though it might make you look spammy, get an email too.

Raffle Code

As promised, I’ll be raffling off one $75USD Steam digital gift cards, and two $25 cards shortly. Just to be super transparent, here’s the raffle code.

And no, I’m sure mathematically this wouldn’t hold up in a real lottery–but for a raffle with fewer than 20 valid entrants, I think we can call it good.

function rankRaffleEntrants(){
        var entrants = "Prima Secunda Tertia Quarta Quinta Sexta Septima Octavia Nina Decima"; //Steam handles
        entrants = entrants.split(" ");
        ol = document.getElementById("orderedList");
        //print function
        function addToList(entrant){
          var li = document.createElement('li');
          var nextInList = document.createTextNode(entrant);
          li.appendChild(nextInList);
          ol.appendChild(li);
        }
        while (entrants.length>1){
          var pick = Math.round(Math.random()*(entrants.length-1));
          var entrant = entrants.splice(pick,1);
          addToList(entrant);
        }
        addToList(entrants[0]);
      }