Bevendre

I love it when someone posts a contest and others bring up the contest guidelines, particularly when likes and reblogs are used to track entries.  Such entry methods are discouraged, but are discouraged through the desire to avoid nongenuine social gestures under the social guideline section.

These guidelines discourage not only the use of likes and reblogs in contests, but also the use of asks, fanmail likes and reblogs to encourage others to visit your blog.  Included in such gestures would be including followers in any created posts in the hopes that they would reblog, sending questions intended to interact with other blogs in character or out, etc.

Using likes and reblogs as contest entries does violate the contest and social guidelines of tumblr in a general sense, but so too do a good deal of the activity that goes into running and interacting with ask blogs.  We are in a community that thrives because of these violations whether people recognize that or not, and given tumblr staff’s silence on the topic since the policies were revised in March of 2012 (and their silence on MUCH more pressing and damaging issues within this fandom and others) it shouldn’t be considered an issue.