Hello everyone!
“My name is Una and I am from the Codeforces team” — this is usually how my messages to users of the site begin. One of the reasons why I write a message is very joyful — sending out gifts to the winners of the competitions and now also to participants of crowdfunding dedicated to the 10th anniversary of Codeforces.
That’s what I’d like to talk about a little bit.
Everyone knows where it all starts — there is a round with gifts, in the comments to which after the ending the coordinators or Mike post a list of winners.
Then, in a short time, all winners receive a system message asking them to update the data about the size of the T-shirt and address. In some special cases, such as crowdfunding, for example, all participants receive an email. For various reasons, not everyone has time to fill out the necessary data on time, and therefore later some winners may receive another similar message from me personally.
This is very important!
We don't produce T-shirts or hoodies (or print on them) ourselves: other companies do this for us, therefore, by the time we contact them, we should already have all the data about the sizes of T-shirts! We wait until the last moment for the data from each winner. We are waiting and asking to be extremely careful when filling out the address and size of the T-shirt. In case someone makes a mistake in the size, there’s just nothing we can do after t-shirts are manufactured. Please note the size charts differ from manufacturer to manufacturer thus extra discretion is advised. We recommend disregarding the letter designation (S, M, XXL, etc.) and pay attention to centimetres. So if their dimensional grid differs from ours, we choose the size so that it fits in the best way with the size in our size chart.
Sometimes we contact gift companies by ourselves, and sometimes our partners do it, with the support of which this or that round is held.
Our next step is to wait for gifts to be made and delivered.
And as soon as they come to us, we start packing and sending gifts to all the winners. Then everyone receives a system message with a tracking number of the packages.
Sometimes the whole process can take a long time, sometimes a VERY long time. Especially now! Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and mandatory self-isolation in our country, we face many additional difficulties: many contractors are either slow or not working at all. In some cases, we have to change things, for example, as was correctly noted in the comments under the announcement to "Kotlin Heroes: Episode 4": the badges have changed to stickers.
We are trying to speed up the process, but, to our great regret, delays in delivery are inevitable. Due to the epidemic, some countries stopped mail exchange with Russia (all parcels to these countries will be sent as soon as everything is settled), and some significantly increased the delivery time of parcels.
Most important: the gifts will surely reach all the winners! We put all our efforts into it!
Please accept our heartfelt thanks for your patience and understanding! We really appreciate your support!
P.S. And this is usually the last phrase in my messages: "If you have any questions, write me a message and we will figure it out together."
So feel free to dm me. :)
