Cycle Canada contest

Back in 2008 I entered a contest in Cycle Canada for an all-expense paid trip for two to Morocco with a BMW motorcycle to ride while there.

Imagine my surprise when the editor (at that time) Costa Mouzouris called to tell me I had won. I later received a follow-up letter from the associate publisher Kim Malczewski confirming that I had won, and to contact the tour provider MotoCadia to make arrangements.

Alas, the Morocco trip was cancelled for lack of registration. But as stated in the letter "in the case where the trip was to be cancelled for any reason, the trip will be substituted for a more frequently available Portugal trip by MotoCadia".

Game on ~ let's go to Portugal then.

Not so fast. When I contacted MotoCadia again in April of 2009 (no trips over the winter on the schedule) I was informed they were just about going out of business and would probably not be sending me anywhere in the foreseeable future. When I called Cycle Canada about this they said they were not responsible if the tour operator would/could not uphold their agreement to send me on a trip.

EXCEPT....last month I looked online and lo and behold, MotoCadia did not go out of business and is offering tours to Portugal, Morocco, Great Britain and Scotland this fall.

Suffice to say the owner Julian Cade stopped replying to my emails back in 2009. So I contacted Cycle Canada's Kim Malczewski again three weeks ago to ask if they would be interested in assisting with this boondoggle. She reiterated again they were not responsible for ensuring the tour operator carried out their end of the deal, but she would "follow-up" with them.

And that's the last I've heard since then.

I've also posted to Cycle Canada's own web forum at Cycle Canada contest - Cycle Canada - Forum - Passion Performance network

I can't imagine it being even remotely acceptable to offer a contest prize in a national magazine in Canada and not honor it.

The Canadian Competition Bureau has some pretty stiff corporate penalties for failing to follow through on delivering contest prizes, but it won't help my situation.

 

Holy Sheep Crap!!!!I can't believe they would not honor their end of the bargain. What a bunch of turds...

I will never buy any of their magazines or ever use this travel service.

Sorry to hear about your misfortune...I would get a litigation specialist.

 

You could give us the email address of the editor and we could all send nasty emails...

 

Holy thread revival batman!! Safe T any news bub?? :bump:

 

I don't know if that's a good idea as it could be deemed as harassment.

I know at my work emails are taken very seriously and sometimes people have the RCMP at their door as a result.

Like the time I heard that someone sent an antagonizing email to a Minister and the RCMP showed up on his doorstep.


Thanks

 

I never read the dates only the comments....apologies

 

Hey no apologies needed, just being a smartass. Now I'm curious as to what ever happened though......... SAFE-T where you at bub???

 

It's like trying to buy property in Russia.

 

Ah hell, you've unleashed Tink on their asses, their lives will never be the same, but we will get some good laughs outta it !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

I see you guys try to do this a lot around here when people piss you off. While commendable, the strategy has been mostly ineffective since Google did some tweaking back in 2007.

Quote from the wiki article on google bombing;

"By January 2007, Google changed their indexing structure[2] so that Google bombs such as "Miserable failure" would "typically return commentary, discussions, and articles"[2] about the tactic itself. Google announced the changes on its official blog. In response to criticism for allowing the Google bombs, Matt Cutts, the head of the Google’s Webspam team, said that Google bombs had not “been a very high priority for us.”[2][16]"

So while it can be effective under certain circumstances (the sentence structures make a large difference), you have just as much chance(somewhere around 10-20%) of it working if you say it once instead of 5,10,20,100 times(actually, the more you do it the less chance it will work since google's spider algorythms now look for multiple entries on the same pages and will sometimes disregard the statement entirely if it's deemed repetitive enough).

Not trying to be a smart arse, quite the contrary. Just trying to save people the hassle when it doesn't really work anymore anyway.

Cheers.

 

One could still mailbomb them.
Or how about a redirect to antivirus xp?

There is a plethora of options out there.

I would still look at civil litigation unless both companies have gone into receivership..

Since no one I know has ever purchased one of their magazines I can't see how they could be in business..probably just surviving on selling ads.

There magazine sucks anyways..

BTW my VFR was once owned by a guy that was purportedly one of their journalists. You wouldn't believe how much work the bike needed!!!! It was an absolute nightmare.

 

While there are options such as you listed, they are complicated to execute (such as sending them viruses). Not only that but the legal implications involved with such things are particularly horrendous.

At the very best, you would take someones machine down for a day or two. That, and if they ever found out who you were, you'd most likely be sued for the lost time that they couldn't work. Could be as paltry as a few hundred dollars, but if you took out multiple machines that $ number grows exponentially.

I know this because I've been down that road. It's not very pretty. I'm on a few watchlists due to my nefarious activites as a young teenager.

You're better off with signing their email up to as many porn sites as you can think of. Bonus points for the weird ones. Atleast then you're not looking at legal implications since it's fairly difficult to track who signed up for what and where.


Sorry to hear that your bike was in such a condition. Sucks when you have to jump through hoops just to ride.

 

That took a lot more effort to read then should be necessary. My eyes are bleeding a little.

However, for the record, that is in fact the correct way to google bomb. I was simply stating the previous tactic you used wouldn't work as effectively as you would have hoped.

Seems you've got it down packed now though.

 

If everybody in Toronto who rides boycotts them, that should be enough to put them out of business.

And possibly notify their advertisers of their disgrace. Then they are tits up, as they say.or maybe tits down...

 

I hate to tell you this but I just watched some cycle canada crap on TV.as a matter of fact yesterday afternoon that was footage of a BMW motorcycling trip to Morocco.

On the trip was reps from BMW Canada, our less than shitty local automotive journalists, A total beginners and dead weight to have on a trip like that.

Once again, civil litigation is your key to obtaining your entitlement. If they are still in business I don't believe a judge would not rule in your favor!!

 

As a webhost operator, I log every IP and MAC address that even looks at my firewall,( yes Im paranoid, but I also can sell the raw data on the geographic demograph if I wished) All the "email" sign-up forms that I host also gain the MAC address of the network card that the host is using via a banner grab (its how we know who your computer is) This works well through type 2 and 3 NAT routers (read home and small office routers) on the chance that you do this from your office, I get the routers MAC and its (Generaly) Static IP and your ISP's Name. If im doing this, so are countless others (including google).

My suggestion is not to deture you, just use a public access system such as bogoing wifi ports (they provide trial accounts that link to no one and proxy all web trafic) or public access terminals(not your library's as they record who and when was on their systems)

+5 if you get them into something that would make a german porn director gag on.

all tech stuff aside,

Just complain to your local ombusman, they always need stuff like this.

 

Ditto for Ombudsman...