Are you the winner? (probably not, but it's not my fault!)

No... probably not... because there is a good chance you are a no-reply blogger!! :)

The winner for the Sew Mama Sew giveaway is announced at the end of this post. 

But while there is only one winner, there are an amazing number of people that didn't even have the chance to participate because they didn't bother checking if they are no-reply bloggers!

So let me spend some words on that.

Are you a no-reply blogger?

Don't just think "of course not, I am not" because you MAY be and you may not even know!

Clues that you MAY be a no-reply blogger:

1. Did you enter hundreds of giveaways this week and you didn't win any of them?
2. Did you enter hundreds of giveaways this week and you didn't get any email back that says "thank you for participating" or similar?

An extremely important thing to know is that your status could have been changed without you noticing!! If you answer "yes" to any of the questions above, it's worth to double check it.
Email and privacy settings may have been changed from another app or program and since many applications are connected, you may have accidentally turned into a no-reply blogger!!!

Here some statistics about what happened in my giveaway:

• total number of comments submitted: 290
• number of comments from no-reply bloggers: 113
• number of comments with no email:  68

So as you can see, there are a good number of no-reply bloggers that actually put their email address in the comment and they were entered in the drawing. The saddest thing is that many of the comments without addresses were like "I follow you on FB, Pinterest, Flickr, bloglovin...".
So even if you are a follower I couldn't really reward you for that because your email didn't show up and several times in the past I announced winners that never got back to me! :(

Whether you won or not, the no-reply blogger is a good thing to fix for the future.

Now why is this situation happening in the first place?

1. you don't want to share you email address in your profile, because you have privacy concerns or you don't want the evil google to have your contact information :)
   Well... this is how I see it: it may be a good philosophical position, but to be coherent you shouldn't want to enter a giveaway that is on the platform you don't support! For example I don't have Instagram, I don't like Instagram so I don't enter giveaways or swaps on Instagram.
   There is a saying in Italian: "Non si puo' avere la botte piena e la moglie ubriaca" this translates to "You can have your cake, or you can eat it"... actually it translates to "You cannot have a full wine cask and have your wife drunk at the same time" :)
2. you have a different platform that does not play well with blogger
   I know this happens, but setting up a new blogger account (with a new or existing email address) is not that difficult. So if you don't want to do it, well, see my answer above
3. you don't know that this is happening to you
   I had this when I started blogging and I was really sad that I didn't win anything or get conversation with people. So I took the time to investigate the issue and fix it. It takes time (about 5 minutes) but again see the answer in 1 :) 

So, even if now these giveaways are done, do you want an easy way to see if you can be reached from your comments? Write me a comment below with the text "Hello, can you hear me?". If I reply back with the next line of Adele's song, then you are fine :) if not... well then you know!
I will answer EVERY single comment in this post within 24h. 
In the giveaway post I missed some of them because of the volume of the comments!.

And finally... let's announce the winner!!

I contacted you via email, so please get back to me soon or I will have to draw another winner!!