I got banned after only three days. I should have anticipated this. I had a rough start when I couldn’t submit an entry after working on it for two hours. The problem is that they demand 10 forum comments/posts before anyone can participate. Many of the posts that I looked at were closed. I found a few that I could comment on but not enough. My work was wasted.

I considered abandoning the site at that point, but I gave it another try. I eventually found their “hangout” thread and complete the necessary requirements, but a few of my comments got deleted and were responded to with hostility by moderators. I wasn’t trolling or being argumentative, but they did not like the obviousness of my attempt to get 10 comments.

I finally submitted something, but it was for a different contest. The first one expired before I got my 10 comments. I discovered today that my submission was rejected. It wasn’t because I submitted crap. It was rejected because I used 3D graphics software. This is a really stupid reason to reject a submission. Their official explanation is that vectors can be resized and raster images cannot, but 3D can be re-rendered at different resolutions. It’s actually a vector but of a different type.

A simple rejection of my submission would not have been so bad. What happened is I submitted twice. The first submission was missing the name of the company, so I submitted a revised version. Both of my submissions for this specific contest got rejected. There is a 30 point penalty for each rejection and I only had 10 points. That means I now have -50 points, which is an automatic ban.

This was the submission that got me banned: