@clayborn Please understand that this was our first contest. I'm sorry that you are upset, but understand that we will do better as time goes forward. The rules for entering the contest were as follows.

While Haley did not say "spotlight entertainment contest #1" she showed clear intent to enter the contest by saying "Spotlight contest number one", it wasn't possible for her to have prerecorded the entry. We made a judgement to accept Haley's entry as it satisfied our goals for verifying her videos originality

We saw that users from MSP were taking to the official post comments so we were trying to be accommodating for both styles even though the original post stated that you could only use votes inside your own submission comments. This alone would have put Isaria out of the top 3. So our flexibility went both ways.

In the future, we will not be flexible. We have already disqualified 2 writing submissions as they do not meet the requirements.

As for cheering for Haley, we also went to MSP and cheered for Isaria and Aace. We sincerely believe that everyone who made it into the top 3 deserved to win the prize.

For anyone reading this, I'm sorry if this first round has been frustrating and I hope as time goes on we can all help Spotlight evolve into something structured, fair, and accessible by all Steemians.

If you have any questions relating to ethics of fairness I'm happy to discuss it here or on Discord.