Tracy, I don't think anyone who entered the contest is angry with you. I'm definitely not. Okay, maybe you messed up by not checking with an admin first, but as you said, contests were being run in the galleries before now. So, it seems like an honest mistake, and I see no reason for you to receive an 'official' warning. The polite and professional thing to do would have been to 'unofficially' notify you that you were violating their rules and give you a chance to rectify the matter (call a halt to the contest, IM the entrants to let them know the contest had been postponed and they would need to take 'contest' out of their image title or risk having it deleted, etc.) Such drastic measures as deleting work from people's galleries should not have been undertaken without notice. That is the action that I'm appalled and angered by (and I'm one of the fortunate ones. For some reason my image didn't get deleted and I've now changed the title in an attempt to keep it safe. I just feel badly for everyone who did lose things from their galleries). So please don't beat yourself up over this, and anyways it sounds like there were 3 or 4 other contests currently running, there's no way you can hold yourself responsible for those contests suffering the same fate (or old contest images being deleted). ;-)
Hugs, Julia

Just editing to say that when I refer to images being lost, what I really mean is the comments. I'm assuming most people really do keep back up images (although if like someone mentioned if your backup is damaged and then your image gets yanked from here without warning...well, you're screwed).

Message edited on: 09/17/2004 04:28