Brad

We're looking into this. This is the first year we've had the new version of the vBulletin forum software on the cluster of servers we use for Black Friday, so bugs like these were bound to come up. No need to report the erorrs anymore - we've got enough data to work with now. -Brad

Now that the contest has been running for a little over a week, some reminders: PLEASE remember to put the store and price in the title of your thread (if your deal is for a specific item that has a price). Also, remember to include a link in your description. If you are a new member and can't post links yet, that's OK, but tell people how to find it on the retailer's site (i.e. search for item # 394839) Thanks and keep posting those deals!

new thread created for Q4. keep using the #-format so www.perimeterperusing.com will stay updated

Thanks for the offer but I have everything taken care of this year :)

Just submitted a support ticket to address the "out of memory" errors. Considering we have 3 servers now instead of 1, there obviously should be no problems with not having enough memory, lol.

I haven't seen anything myself and nobody else has reported anything at all today, either on the forum or via the contact form on the site. Might be something specific to your ISP caused by the server move last night. Maybe you are still hitting the old server for some reason. If anyone else has had errors, please post here.

They said their BF specials would be released "soon".

OK, will have a press release going out on Monday morning.

Half Price Books sent their BF ad info to us directly last year. Maybe I should e-mail them and see if they'll be doing the same this year...

For those of you who are interested in buying a shirt, what price did you have in mind? I'm thinking about possibly having one or more "one-day sales" over the next 6 weeks or so where you can buy a shirt if you'd like, but there would only be a limited quantity available since we still want to give most of these away.

Well you actually had about a 5 in 120 shot since there were 5 shirts given away, but you weren't picked, so I guess it doesn't matter now anyway

Winners have been selected. They are... sweetdiggity bluesky225 Thumper501 tinkrbel wnc_mom Congrats! Look for the next contest soon.

Nope, but the contest only ran until today at noon ET (as stated in the OP). Winners coming in a few minutes...

What I hope to do is when we reach the halfway point of the contest, I'll send everyone who has posted deals a PM letting them know how many entries they currently have and where they stand as far as the overall number of entries. Also, we may have bonus days where deals will earn double entries.

Contest is closed. I will pick the winners later today when I get back to a computer.

We took suggestions given by you all from various threads over the years and put together a list of suggestions for stores to use on Black Friday. Take a look: http://blackfriday.gottadeal.com/BlackFriday101 and let us know if we've forgotten anything. Hopefully a few of the decision-makers frequent our BF site and happen to come across the list. We might also put it out as a press release to get it a little more exposure.

A lot of those could be the various search engine bots. There are A LOT of threads in there for them to crawl compared to this year's BF boards.

Good point.

thanks everyone. i guess that makes the decision easy. saves me some time, lol.

Just throwing this out there... how many of you would find copies of previous year's ad scans useful? We have the text lists of the ad items from 2003-2009 posted at all times, but we take the scans down a few days after BF each year. I have full Black Friday newspapers from the past 3-4 years (and a large-format scanner to make scanning easier), but I don't know if it would be worth the time to scan and post these older ads. These would be clean scans of the final ad, not poor photos or chopped up scans like some of the leaked ones we normally post. So let me know what you think. Are these pretty much useless by now? Should I scan them? Just scan the "main" stores?

Update: there were some questions about Target.com not being on the list. We had some technical issues with Target that have since been fixed, so Target.com is back on the list. Any deals posted in the last few days for Target will still count as well, even though it was missing from the list.

Remind me by sending me a PM every month or so and if I'm not too swamped with BF duties, I'll post an update. Both will count unless the original clearance thread already had that individual item listed inside.

A lot of people picking Ace... in past years they have sent letters saying we couldn't post their ad early, but that they'd send a final copy as soon as it was ready...

And of course now the server move has been postponed until Thursday night (not my idea, lol)

Yeah.... sorry about that We're moving to the Black Friday server cluster tomorrow night, so to prepare for that I deleted a bunch of old threads. These were primarily old/expired deals, contests, freebies, surveys, etc... that were at least a year old. This helped make the database a little smaller, which means less downtime tomorrow night and in December when we move back, and it should have a slight overall improvement as far as the performance of the site. So that explains your (and many others) drop in post count. I only do this once per year, so when you hit 5,000 again, it should stick :)