4-UP: Let's give a hand to our 4-UP Admins!

I've been so busy lately with work (my real job that keeps this site going!) that I haven't given enough credit to the guys who have been the backbone of this season of the 4-UP WWE Fantasy Wrestling game.

There have been four of our players here who have been seriously awesome about entering all the data each week for all of WWE's TV/PPV shows.  Seriously, it's tough work - for whatever show they are entering scores for, they have to keep track of EVERY member of the WWE roster that appears on that show in live fashion.  (exceptions of course being extremely new members of the roster, but it's not like that makes things easier!)  And not only that, but they have to follow everything that wrestler does!

I can't even imagine how tough some elimination matches (especially battle royales) have been to score - I know when I've tried to verify the results entered by our admins, there is NO OTHER RESOURCE on the web that accurately says what wrestlers scored eliminations!  Yeah, that does make it tough for me to make sure we've got the right scores going in, but it's a lot easier to confirm what someone else says than to try and state everything that happened yourself!

So if you are playing our 4-UP WWE Fantasy Wrestling game - and of course a lot of you are or we wouldn't have any rankings - our 4-UP Admins deserve a TON of thanks! 

It does say on the 4-UP homepage who the admins were who contributed to the scoring the previous week - but I think it's pretty safe to say we've had a consistent group of 4 admins this season.  The only fair way I can give them to you in order is by how long they've been helping out with 4-UP, so here are those 4:

apsouthern - I can't even remember running the game without apsouthern helping out - I think I'm correct in saying that he's been helping since the beginning!  (and how long has that been?  since Season 5 - which started in April 2009!)  Not only has he helped the longest, but he really rocks out the scores and gets them more correct than I could ever hope.  There's no way the game would still be around today without him!

wwefan18 - He's been a big support for the site in general for a really long time, not only with 4-UP scores but with keeping me updated on changes to PPV line-ups.  So if you don't play 4-UP but play every month on the PPV prediction games, wwefan18 has contributed a lot to making everything happen pretty smoothly here!  And since he's joined up helping with 4-UP, it's been an enormous help - especially considering he enters data for every WWE show each week more often than not!

nighte - I actually may be wrong in my ordering here, because I also can't remember a time when I ran 4-UP that nighte wasn't helping out.  So hopefully there's no offense taken if I've gotten my dates wrong here - nighte has been one of the most consistent helps with 4-UP!  I also get updates from nighte on PPV prediction games when needed, which has never been something I've asked for - so a huge thanks for that.  nighte has also contributed in many other ways, some that would make me list him first in lists ordered in other ways!

NeedRepairs - I had no idea when I was asking to see if there were any other players here who would be happy to help with the 4-UP scoring that I'd get a response from someone who jumped right in and helps as much as NeedRepairs.  I can't even say enough about it - NeedRepairs has been incredible since joining the team.  He helps with every single show each week and nails it, and that's an unbelievable help to me every week when I have to lock in the final scores and run the rankings. 

We've had many other 4-UP admins in the past, and I appreciate every contribution from anyone who's helped - even if it was just for one week.  I'm pretty sure the guys I mentioned above have been the main 4 contributing this season, but if I've missed anyone, yikes, let me know because I'll feel really bad about it and I'll want to give you a shout-out here!  If anyone is wondering why there are 4 admins, when technically there could just be one person entering data for the three shows each week (plus a PPV on the one week it happens) - well, you probably haven't tried to do this before!  It's not an easy job at all - and it's a volunteer job!  Of course presumably they're all playing the game too so they will want to help out to make sure the game keeps running - but really, it boils down to the fact that these people are helping out completely out of the kindness of their hearts! 

And that brings me to an announcement that will last until the end of 2010 -

Any donations that are received via the donation link found at the top-right of the site will go towards gift certificates for our 4-UP admins.  I'd love to at the very least send each of our admins a $25 Amazon gift certificate - so even the smallest donation will help with that!

I was doing this in the past, trying to award the admins with Amazon gift certificates, and I did - but I've been trying to move more to give more gift certificates to our PPV winners, especially with $50 ones for the "bigger" PPVs. 

Since the donation button says all donations will go towards prizes - I will still award $25 Amazon gift certificates for all remaining WWE & TNA PPVs for 2010.  Of course, for any donation, you'll still receive a direct thanks from me - so I'll give the option via email to you if you do not want your donation to go towards 4-UP (in the event that you don't play the 4-UP game - in which case you have no reason to donate to our admins!).  And anyone who donates who wishes their donation made public, I'm happy to do that.

Regardless of donations, though, at a bare minimum I will award all of the admins who have consistently helped this season with a $10 Amazon gift certificate.  So you can consider my donation at this point $40!  And for any new players, if you think that's not that much - I'll still be awarding $110 in prizes to the season winners of the prediction games and 4-UP, and that's not counting individual PPV prizes.  And no, the ads on the site do not cover all of those costs if you're wondering - so every donation is a huge help and contributes to the fund that I can use to give prizes!  And that fund is almost 100% contributed to by me - a few players have donated (and got very thankful emails back!) and the ads do help somewhat a few times a year, but if I had to give a guess, I'd put my contributions at 95% of what's gone out as prizes since the site was born!  (and most people may think I'm crazy by giving out prizes when the site doesn't bring in at least enough money to cover it - maybe I am, but I've been a wrestling fan since I was a kid - and I know how awesome it would have been when I was young to predict a WWF PPV so well amongst people all over the world that I won a prize!)

The alternative of course would be if this became an insanely popular site for every wrestling fan out there - then I would hope money would be coming in enough where I could give back to everyone who's helped so much!  So if you can't donate but still want to help in some way - share the site with anyone you can!  Eventually that small contribution could turn into something tangible to anyone who's helped me with the site!

So anyway..   I really just wanted to open the donations up where anything contributed would strictly go to our 4-UP admins.  They really, really deserve it!  I'll never ask for donations to keep the site running, or try to charge anyone for access to the site - so don't ever worry about that!  As far as I'm concerned, this site will be around as long as I am - and always free to play.  (and hopefully always with prizes up for grabs!)

But whether or not you can help out in any of those ways - you still have my appreciation for coming here and playing any of the games here!  Anyone coming to the site and playing means a lot to me, and I'm sure all of the 4-UP admins feel more satisfied when they see more people playing week-to-week.  I know I do. :)  So thanks to everyone, old and new players, who have made this site so much fun to maintain - we're getting close to the 3 year anniversary!  Crazy!