Tom's Hardware Tutorial Contest – Win a Nexus Tablet!

News
By Marcus Yam
published

Write a tutorial and you could win a Nexus 7 tablet or an Amazon gift card!

We're pleased to announce the Tom's Hardware Tutorial Contest which will run from October 1st to December 31st!  Every Monday, Tom's Hardware will award prizes to the Top 10 tutorial authors from that week, with the user with the most tutorials receiving a $50 Amazon Gift Card and the 9 that follow receiving $10 Amazon Gift Cards each.  A bonus $10 gift card will be applied to any authors in the Top 10 who wrote more than 3 tutorials in that week.  At the end of the month on the 30th, the participant who wrote the most tutorials for that month will win a new Google Nexus 7 tablet!
 
There's no limit to the amount of gift cards you can win, but you can only win one Google Nexus 7 tablet throughout the duration of the contest.  The singular consideration is the number of quality tutorials created, with a tie-breaker based on the number of Reads.
 
What: The Tutorials Contest
When: October 1st through December 31st
Where: The Tutorials Contest Landing Page
Who: Any registered Tom's Hardware user
How: Post a Tutorial!
What: Prizes are-
 
• Google Nexus 7 Tablets
• $50 Amazon Gift Cards
• $10 Amazon Gift Cards
 

Before being awarded for a tutorial, the tutorial must be approved by the Community Manager and Senior Moderators. Valid Tutorials meet the following requirements:
 
• Must include steps-by-step instructions or bullet points.
• Must be useful, and not be stupid easy (ie- how to resize a jpg)
• Must include at least one image or screenshot.
• Must not be plagiarized. Copy/pasting from elsewhere is disallowed.
• Must be unique, and cannot duplicate tutorial topics already existing. Once a topic is taken, it is taken.
• Must not be short (minimum around 250 words).
• Must not be a disguised advertisement (ie- for a single app).
 
Tutorials rejected will be removed, and will not count. For a good review on how to write a great tutorial, check out the Guide to Tutorials here.
 
Happy posting, and good luck to all participants!
 
Yours,
Joe Pishgar
Community Manager

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
14 Comments Comment from the forums
  • fractal123
    No thanks.

    Surely you jest.

    How low can Toms (and other technical enterprises) go?

    Even at the poorest-paid fast-food joint rewards its workers better than that.
    Reply
  • jpishgar
    fractal123, there were a ton of our users posting Tutorials already, and if you've seen our forum subcategories, you know many of our veteran members have posted lengthy guides already for overclocking, system builds, Windows troubleshooting and a myriad number of other issues. Many of these have been made into stickies, but there's only so much space we have at the top of the forum, which is why we added the Tutorials option.

    This contest is a way of rewarding these power users and our way of saying "Thanks!" for all the hard work our dedicated community of experts has been up to. You don't have to participate if you don't want. I expect most of the guys who are going to win this week are barely even going to try, or may not even be aware of the contest until I pm them and ask them what email they'd like their gift cards sent to. Helping other users and building out these detailed guides is like second nature to them. One of the things Tom's is really proud of is a vibrant community of active, engaged users, and we've got an army of volunteer moderators, experts living across 7 continents answering questions in all time zones, entire teams Folding@Home and System Builders, showcasing their rigs and crafting the most meticulous of cooling solutions, just to name a few.

    The help here is free. The news here is free. The forum is free. We intend to keep it that way, and we'll do our best to recognize and award great content when great content emerges from our bad-ass community.
    Reply
  • slomo4sho
    11635393 said:
    The help here is free. The news here is free. The forum is free. We intend to keep it that way, and we'll do our best to recognize and award great content when great content emerges from our bad-ass community.

    Free? Please don't patronize us. The users are subject to advertisements and the site is paid by said advertisers. In addition, articles and news stories that are related to your advertisers have been tainted with bias and show clear favoritism for specific products and manufacturers. The saving grace of this site is the community and the forums contributors who actually do end up providing both sides of a debate and enable the individual to draw their own conclusions. Or at least one can hope.
    Reply
  • jpishgar
    Advertisements in the news area does indeed support the site and allow us to pay staff and bandwidth costs - we are supported in that way, yes. What I was referring to is the service provided to users. Many news organizations have switched over to a subscriber-only or pay wall setup, and we remain free. Registered users in the forums also experience no advertisements.

    If you are going to accuse Tom's of bias or "taint", please cite specifics. I've refuted these types of generic, broad-based misstatements before. Editorial independence is fiercely maintained, and Tom's reputation is founded on unbiased, consumer-sided reporting, so we take those types of allegations seriously. So as not to further gravitate off-topic on this thread, please private message me with specifics you'd like to cite.
    Reply
  • shin0bi272
    This is a cool contest and I do help users out as much as I can but I dont really write tutorials per se. Good luck to the ones that enter though that nexus tablet is pretty sweet.
    Reply
  • joneb
    "I expect most of the guys who are going to win this week are barely even going to try, or may not even be aware of the contest until I pm them and ask them what email they'd like their gift cards sent to." So its all already decided. Why not just reward these guys instead of a fake competition? I was going to try but not now.
    Reply
  • jn77
    So I "potentially" can get a gift card or free tablet to do the work of what a full time employee of Tomshardware should be paid to do. I think I will pass.
    Reply
  • getochkn
    Since Tom's started pushing the tutorial thing a month or so ago, all I've seen is crappy tutorials that don't really cover anything, filled with spelling mistakes, bad image links, etc. One was how to make your internet and browsing faster, and all it was, was the steps to set the Google DNS servers and that was it.
    Reply
  • mesab66
    I think a number of folk are way off mark with their negativity here.

    "This contest is a way of rewarding these power users and our way of saying "Thanks!" for all the hard work our dedicated community of experts has been up to"

    .....To put this principle down makes no sense whatsoever.
    Reply
  • randomizer
    11672716 said:
    "I expect most of the guys who are going to win this week are barely even going to try, or may not even be aware of the contest until I pm them and ask them what email they'd like their gift cards sent to." So its all already decided. Why not just reward these guys instead of a fake competition? I was going to try but not now.
    I think you misunderstood him. What he's saying is that there have been relatively few entries at present ("present" being Oct 1) and those that have been posted are quite likely by people who didn't even know about the contest and would have created the tutorials regardless.
    Reply