Halloween is on the horizon, but the seasoned IT administrator knows that frightful happenings aren't limited to one day in October. Everyone's got a story of being haunted by legacy code, or bringing a Frankensetup to life. We're celebrating the spooky holiday by sharing and collecting these sysadmin horror stories as animated GIFs—and offering a suite of sweet prizes to the scariest stories.

How to Enter

To enter, just go to this spOoOoky submission page. There's a field for the GIF URL (original GIFs are welcome but not required), and a place to put your caption. Your GIF will be added to the gallery.

We've hit up some of our internal GIFmasters to kick things off. If you're looking for more inspiration, we recommend checking out our SysAdmin Day gif contests (2012, 2013) or DevOps Reactions.

Some examples:

Users during routine maintenance:

When you get a request for IE 6:

Note: the GIFs don't have to be Halloween-themed, but the caption should (loosely) describe something frightful.

How to win

There are two great ways to win. The top three GIFs (as determined by voting) will receive one of our grand prizes:

One free ticket to PuppetConf 2014, September 23–24 in San Francisco

ticket to PuppetConf 2014, September 23–24 in San Francisco AR.Drone 2.0 Wi-Fi Quadcopter

$150 Amazon gift card

Just by submitting, you are also entering for a bonus opportunity to win one of 20 Puppet Labs prize packs—including a t-shirt, fabulous technical books, stickers, and more.

Rules

The rules of the contest are simple (and familiar, if you've seen our SysAdmin Day Contests from past years).

Submissions must be <2 MB, and must be mostly appropriate (please no nudity, depictions of real acts of terrible violence, etc.).

You can submit as many GIFs as you want

You can vote multiple times, but please only vote for each GIF once.

Anyone can vote, and it's a best practice to encourage people to vote for your GIF to increase your chances to win.

We're looking forward to seeing your chilling submissions!



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