Some explanaton about the lottery.
You must be registered on main page to take part due to security and anti-abuse reasons. We added poll to not to make it so easy . Second, login is required to avoind such things like spam or filling out form for someone else with wrong answer , thus making him impossible to win. Yes that would mean that registering someone with wrong data will make your chances higher in winning after all. Only if you have submitted proper application.

Similiar anti-abuse option was introduced at the beginning of lottery, which resulted in rage of certain users that just did not created account before the 1st December. I will not describe in detail why we did it cause still it may be used as increasing chances of winning for some users. Of course some of you can get the idea how to trick the system, but taking in account already vast amount of applications the chances are quite low now . But then I think the lottery rules can be much more restrictive in the future – not only the registration date but things like minimum amount of posts on forums or comments etc. That is to make sure that gifts are given to the people that participate in the 1EUR != 1USD issue and are not the freshly registered users that can get a free candy and don't give a f… about the rest of the story and the site.
Anyway, I hope stranded will be able to make more lotteries in the future – time will tell.

Someone asked about creating FAQ for lottery. Give us some questions as example that we could put there. (Some answers without questions are in the news already).

1. Q:What happens if i did not answered all questions properly?
A: Then our submission is not taken into account when generating the list of the winners. So you better take your time before you submit the form, cause you an do it only once.
Small stats so far (2009-12-20 01:30 UTC)
343 total applications
204 correct ones, those are the people that got chance of winning the gift,
139 incorret ones, and those people got no chance in winning at all.

2. Q: What are the gifts in the lottery?
A: That is the whole surprise in the lottery, isn't it? Besides, imagine we may have non-disclosure agreement with the party that is offering us the gifts, not to mention that we may not even know the exact gifts we will be given. In addition not all games are funded by stores. Some games were funded by us.
But we can assure you that gifts are game cd-keys. The whole prize pool (now) is around 100EUR and there are 20 gifts. Simple math and searching online store should give you impression what games that might be.

3. Q: will the rules change in next lottery?
A: If there will be next lottery, I guess they will change due to anti-abuse reasons described above.

4. Q: Why webpage is going down?
A: Stranded is paying specific amount of money for hosting. For that price it has limit of connections to the database. That means the site can be affected by the slashdot effect.

5. Q:Did you get payment for the lottery from the sponsors?
A: No, we asked them if they would like to sponsor few games for our anniversary, they agreed and in return we are obliged to show their banners on our site for around a month