Competition concern

I have been buying your mag now for over 12 months. After being with Windows for years, your mag has helped me a lot. Being a silver surfer is good – but after all this time I still cannot enter your competitions!

Take your February issue (#322), I enter the website ‘bit.com/T5SSDcom’ but its not recognised. Can you give me some instructions on how I can enter your competitions? by Dave foulk es

Paul says…

We’ve had a few people contact us to say they’ve struggled to reach our compo pages. On a few occasions this has been our fault; the page hasn’t been live when subscribers get their copies ahead of the street date. Apologies for that; we’ve taken steps to prevent this happening in the future.

Another trouble – and you’re not alone in being tripped up by this, Dave – is the web address format. For space reasons, we use the Bitly service to shorten most addresses in the magazine. It uses the .ly domain, the top-level domain that’s intended for use by businesses operating in Libya, rather than a more familiar .com or .co.uk suffix. It isn’t the first service to co-opt a domain as part of a catchy name or, in this case, to fulfill its purpose of providing shorter addresses.

The fix is to make sure you enter the

domain correctly: you can use bit.ly or bitly. com. Either way, make sure you get the part after the forward slash right, too; in your email, you’d missed out the ‘p’ at the end (as in ‘T5SSDcomp’). Also bear in mind that this part of Bitly addresses is case-sensitive.