It's been a little over 5 years that SQLServerCentral.com has been in business. In that time the community has grown from the founders to over 300,000 members this year. Brian, Andy, and Steve really appreciate the support from the community and all the help we've had with testing, suggestions, and especially content.

After all, it's the daily articles from the real world, from authors just like each of you, that we really appreciate.

So as a token of our appreciation, we're announcing a new contest. It's in honor of a milestone that we expect to reach in about 20 weeks or so from now. It's the ...

Drive for 360

contest as we look forward to hitting 360,000 members. In honor of that, we'd like to give away an XBOX 360 to someone. We're kind of hoping the supply issues will be resolved by late summer when we should hit this mark and we'll likely give some polo shirts and a few other prizes randomly.

The rules are simple. Join SQLServerCentral.com and start contributing. And refer friends since the quicker we hit 360, the quicker we give away the prize.

But we're not giving it away to the 360,000 member. That wouldn't really recognize those that contribute to the community and support the site. Instead we'll be drawing randomly from our current members as follows.

• Everyone that has more than 100 posts and has visited the site in 2006 is eligible. We'll use the last login to confirm you've actually logged in this year.
• For every post between Apr 10 and whenever we hit 360, we'll give you another entry. Please don't post a bunch of useless posts, but answering questions (or asking) as relevant is appreciated.
• For every article you send in, we'll give you 25 additional entries.

There are no guarantees, but it's an easy way to up your entries into the contest. We'll load a table up with the entries and randomly select one back, ordered by newid() to get a semi-random drawing. The winner gets an XBOX 360, one of the bundles with the hard drive and wireless controllers.

Once again, thanks for the last 5 years and we're looking forward to 5 more great ones!

Andy, Brian, and Steve