The boxes should've been fine with how much I was restocking at a time (over 20k items!!) but with the spamming that was going on, they were going through a lot quicker. I honestly didn't know why the pool was going so fast until seeing the threads and talking with the UAs. That's why I did posts earlier today (you can find them in the admin post feed). I'm still going to be restocking them today and periodically through the week for those that wanted to hold off on opening them, but the message on them will change once they close until the next time we use them. :)

I think it's the combination of having an event forum open while the boxes go out. We've only really released these during Luminaire before, which don't have claim threads or anything like it. So people generally post on NPC threads we make (which we didn't this time SRY GUYS) or elsewhere. I guess the most spammy they get during that time is on the game forums? But people are still contributing in some way.

Also I'm completely okay with people just posting on a claim thread in hopes to get a box. I understand some people have anxieties when it comes to really getting involved on the forums, and a claim thread is pretty low risk. People posting on those threads legitimately were never the issue!

Also about the pool - it pulls from the Free Shop. I have a good system set up to restock it (while making sure no god weapons etc go out like the one luminaire lol), so I'm generally the one to restock it. I like doing it manually to be honest, because I get to make sure not too many of one rarity get added etc. I also do like 20k in a batch, and usually during Luminaire that lasts longer than it has over the weekend. :x

I've added a line in the most recent news post, because a lot of people didn't read the "boxes are only going out for the weekend" bit of the original news post! :)

Yeah -- I'm working on a new iteration of these types of things. The goal is to encourage real conversations on the forums, get people chatting with people they wouldn't otherwise chat with, and hopefully increase long term usage of the forums.

So, in that vein, I think next time we'll have a few threads that we set up specifically that give out forum boxes, with NPCs participating. Those threads will be the only places that give them out, and they will have no spam policies in the first thread and detection of the text to make sure that it's not just spam.

We have other ways to engage on the site, there are a million things to do. These boxes are specifically to engage people on the forums, and get more content here. They'll only be given out on the forums.