What Storm Machine said. You can't go more than 72 hours without logging an assignment, except after you win. You may win as early as you like with no penalty.

Also, Elle - on hiatus , for your info since you're fielding a lot of the questions, we've been granting a one-time exception to Preppers who didn't understand the rule, since it's new this year.

Last year, the rule was that you couldn't exceed "3 days based on your local time" between posted assignments, which meant you could log something on 10/1 at 1000 and log the next assignment on 10/4 at 23:59.

Also, some Preppers interpreted the rule as "3 days' assignments" rather than actual calendar days. Some thought you could skip assignments 3 and 4 and catch them up on Day 6 because Day 5 was a freebie day (but the gap there is 10/2-10/6, four days.) Others thought you could finish assignments 1,2,3, and 4 on 10/1, and then not log another completed assignment until 10/6, because the "gap" was between Assignment 4 and Assignment 6, not 10/1 and 10/6 (five days.) But we were manually checking and there was no easy way to catch this. So now we have experienced Preppers who are used to that and think they're being penalized for turning in assignments early.

It is not our intention to penalize people for turning in assignments early. There are two factors at play regarding the 72-hour rule and how it works this year:

1. The rules, which state:
The point is to get you disciplined into writing every day, but life sometimes interferes with even the most disciplined person's good intentions. Therefore, you may catch up on assignments from previous days, so long as you don't go more than 72 hours without logging a completed assignment.

We really do want our Preppers to get into the habit of writing every day, or as close to it as possible. Still, some people are perfectly capable of working way ahead even during NaNo, which brings me to the second point...

2. Limitations of the system.
This is the biggest factor, really, for two reasons:

a. Since the system has no way of knowing in which time zone you live, we can't use it to monitor the first interpretation of the rule ("by the end of the third day based on your local time.")

b. The system is not capable of identifying that someone has "worked ahead" because we allow participants to submit assignments out of order. Someone who has submitted assignment 8 by 10/6 may or may not have completed assignments 1-7. We don't want to enforce the exact order of the calendar either, because it doesn't work for everybody, and the Prep tries to be as flexible as possible with different writing styles, so that leaves us with a limited system. The easiest solution to implement is to calculate the time between logged assignments and set a maximum, which is what we did. The maximum is 72 hours, unless you have completed all assignments 1-31.

THEREFORE, since the rule is new (or at least a new variation of the old rule), and since some people don't understand that the exact nature of the rule has changed, we're allowing one slip. Anyone who complains that they thought they were complying with the rules will receive a one-time exception. The Leaders can manually override one of the timestamps bracketing the offending gap between logged assignments so that the gap complies with the 72-hour rule. And when we do the override, we'll explain to the participant how the rule works, so they'll know how to "manipulate the system" properly.

Also, if anyone works ahead because they know they'll be offline for an extended period, remind them that we can provide specific exceptions for those situations too, so long as we know about them ahead of time. For example, Eric the Fred notified us that he is experiencing a power outage in his area but is continuing to work. He's currently listed as eliminated, but when he returns, we will manually assign timestamps for him that comply with the rule.

Any and all participants and leaders are welcome to ask questions for further clarification. Believe me, we're not trying to penalize anyone, and we want everyone to understand fully how the system works because we don't want people eliminated over misunderstandings. We're not rule nitpickers here and never have been. We just want people to prep their novels and have fun doing it, and the 72-hour rule is designed to eliminate people who are falling farther and farther behind due to too much procrastination, not people who are legitimately trying to work within the guidelines of the system.

Cheers,
Michelle