Hm, since your ideas all seem to contain a lot of work and you wish for something Whitelist related I have a small idea. But it is not that interesting and you would need some kind of spam mail. Why not play a good old "Liar Game"-style game - the Minority Rule:

• Basically it is a voting process. You or one of the participants will ask a question which can be answered with yes or no. Then every participant will send (together with their SG name) a mail to your sacrificial e-mail adress where they vote yes or no.
• You will count every vote and those who form the Minority (NOT necesaarily the ones who answered correctly) will become part of your whitelist and get the right to enter the first game(s)
• Then the second round will begin and so forth until five or less members remain

Pros: Unbiased and luck based, hard to manipulate, nobody can complain, everone can join, nearly immune to outer interference
Cons: Lot of work, needs an E-Mail, may not be that interesting, takes a lot of time (one till several weeks) to complete, probably more that i forgot

For extra fun you could just play without explaining the minority rule and enjoy people complaining why they got kicked from the whitelist although they answered correctly

Or you recruit 100 people and we all play one giant round of Werewolf/Town of Salem in the forum so we can have a real witch hunt for a change of pace.

How about instead of an event you do a Tournament! Which itself would be an event, but an specific one at that. It could be from anything but since this is a gaming forum obviously my first suggestion would be either a fighting game or a competitive fps. Of course those are hard to organize so you could do something like the anime idea. People submit their most funny moments, you pick around 30 people and then everyone else gets to vote on who picked the best one, then 5 most voted get to join your whitelist. I don't like the screenshot one but you could make people drawn or paint their favourite gaming moments and post it here then they get points for creativity, but I guess people would vote the best drawn ones. Anyway, good luck!

Maybe a contest involving creativity, but not everyone is good at ms paint or writing short stories :P

You could do a f2p (or paid for) multiplayer or co-op game play tournament, or just a get together.

Steams Quake Live was f2p at some point, but it appears it is now $10 on steam, not sure what they are doing.

edit: just read your thread, you bring up valid points about trounaments, but it could still be a get together.
the only true fair way, is not to limit or hide the giveaways from the users, and let the RNG gods decide peoples fates.

Lots of interesting ideas coming in, I'm sure whatever you'll decide on will work out better this time.
But you sure like giving yourself a workload don't you? I don't have much more original to add as of right now, but as has been mentioned screenshots based on a predetermined theme could work, and I don't believe the voting would be so biased towards popular users, but on the other hand I've been wrong before.

Looking forward to whatever this events turns out to be!

I dont know how much anime you have seen but you can make an event with guess an anime crossword and put anime or character names into it, so you have to guess something like first letter of the anime and link like oRsIO can become into something like
oruchuban ebichu
Rec
slayers
Ikkitousen
Outlanders
You can make lower cases - anime characters - capital letters - anime titles or vice versa, numbers can be the amount of the letters in the name of the one word anime title so if the answer is slayers it can be s or 7 etc, and the question could be the pictures, screenshots or paint drawings, or explanations

pls no anime ;_;
pls no puzzles ;_;

if you want to make it easer for you, you could just make the event restricted by lv or ratio, let people suggest each other (there were at least 2 events like this), check that all entrants have their wins redeemed, etc.
it doesn't have much challenge but it rewards active people in the forums, contributors and people playing by the rules.

I have a lazy suggestion: Do a giveaway with whatever limit you want, then set a thing they have to do in the giveaway description. After that, all of the guys who did the right thing, put them on a list and assign them numbers. Next, do a random.org pick and let the RNG gods bequeath love to their chosen ones. The chosen ones you can invite to a group or WL pick me

I remember someone made a labyrinth and that was very popular. There was also one where you had to constantly refresh a web page filled with cat gifs and where you would occasionally get one with the space cat that led to a giveaway.

Best of luck to you and sorry about your event.

I'm bad at coming with ideas for events, but whichever event you decide to do, the reward should be to add the ones you selected to your whitelist or to a private steam group that way there would be no risk of someone sharing the links.

Whatever you choose to do I'm looking forward to the chance of participating in it, cause sadly by the time I got to the previous event it was already closed.

OK I thought about it for a while... It might require some extra work. You don't need to use all my ideas but maybe some of them will be helpful who knows ^^

I would love to see an anime screenshot event for some specific games maybe :D Like you give us an anime, we watch it and take a few unique screenshots via steam screenshots (non-google ones) from different episodes, or you can even ask for one with specific anime characters in it. Post the steam links here, and you decide on which ones are worthy to be added into your WL or group.

As I suggested in the previous thread, using itstoohard could help you a lot. I even made an example of how to use it:
http://www.itstoohard.com/puzzle/u0k64ZgI
Hide itstoohard link somewhere in your profile.
You can still use your original idea of link hunt this way combined with the screenshots.

Let's say you can make 3-4 trains for each 1-2 days.

-First create a group for treasure hunt.

• Accept up to maybe 200 participants from the thread with some conditions like minimum level 5, write rules in the thread like no link sharing, no google pictures, no puzzle answers sharing etc and everyone should agree the rules when they ask for an invite.

• Make group forum's view only by members in order to post secret puzzle join codes :D Yeah maybe angry people from last event will try to target it otherwise...

• Empty your whitelist.

Every 1-2 days create a new treasure hunt using:

• Name a game and an anime.
• 20-30 entries with best anime screenshot.
• 20-30 entries with best game screenshot.
• First 20-30 Puzzle solvers.
  And add those people from the group into your whitelist for the daily treasure hunt winners. You get 60-90 entries for giveaways. And when the giveaways end start again from emptying your WL.

You can create a new thread for each daily treasure hunt in addition to the main thread maybe. I think there is almost no chance of puzzle links being shared this way. And you will be using group + White list as safety measures in combination, so it should be OK.

I kind of liked the idea of your last event, and I think with a slight change, could potentially still work;

• First off, make your profile friends only. This way, no one can share links if they aren't on your friend list already
• Secondly, have a screening-process for adding people to your friends-list. They can't add you, you have to add them. This prevents tons of requests from coming in. It is up to you to determine the prerequisites for adding people
• Thirdly, like before, hide a special code (except, not a GA link this time) in a number of screenshots, equal to the number of whitelist-slots you want to hand out
• Last, make it a rule that only the first person to send you the special code (email/PM/comment on the thread/ however you decide to accept it) from the screenshot gets on the whitelist. This way, even if link-sharing does occur, only the first person who finds it/sends you the code is rewarded with the whitelist

Now, due to timezones and whatnot, obviously those who are not awake at the time you start the white-listing process will be left behind when it comes to hunting for the special codes. To account for this, add the codes to your screenshots in batches, updating the thread for when you are planning to "release" them into the "wild" (every 4 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, however you want to space it out)

As for the special codes, they would be different on each screenshot, but you could do something like;
A jumble of letters/numbers (efrsfk324),
Or pre-selected images (possibly unrelated to the screenshot they were found on) that must be posted on the thread as attached images
Or simple phrases ("CaraMelly-Dansen!", "Melly4Lyfe")

Cons: It requires you to add a bunch of people to your friends-list. Not everyone is cool with adding people they don't really know
Pros: It is an evolution of your previous event + uses one of your current ideas

i find you very attractive, and myself.

Edit - Was supposed to be a reply to AuthenticZac
I can see how it could work that way, but as your "Cons" says... I'm not that cool with adding random people xD
And to quote this:

Now, due to timezones and whatnot, obviously those who are not awake at the time you start the white-listing process will be left behind when it comes to hunting for the special codes. To account for this, add the codes to your screenshots in batches, updating the thread for when you are planning to "release" them into the "wild" (every 4 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, however you want to space it out)

I'm in a timezone as well xD

Any link can be leaked, but not your whitelist or your own group.
So you can use those two ways for a safe giveaway.

For event suggestion :
A drawing contest, must include own nickname in the drawing for prove of originality. (photo)

Can I join your whitelist?? I'm new on SG have 2 weeks, or 3, and already did 5 GA

No poll? Aww :(

Saddest anime...
Oh you're gonna have a bad time xD

I have a few ideas as well! ^_^ But I haven't read all suggestions, so sorry if I'm repeating other ideas

1) If you really liked the treasure hunt idea and willing to repeat the whole process you can hide a code words instead of GA links. Codes are words that can be included into some groups, for example - animals, movies, characters, countries, sg users etc. (some common themes, so you can get really creative with hiding words - for example use them in sentence) For example 10 groups with 20 words in each. Then you create ITH puzzle, where instead of questions there are names of groups with all appropriate word acceptable (if I'm not mistaken you can make up to 50 acceptable answers). So in order to solve puzzle we will need to find at least one word for each category. To prevent leaking you can ask us to write one of the words in GA, and every word can only be used for example 3 times. You can even delete used words from acceptable answers on ITH after that. In that case you'll have 200 words*3 uses=600 whitelist spots. Sure a few candidates still can slip illegal, but it'll prevent mass leaking. And to deal with the time differences problem (and also mass leaking) you can hide words not all at once, but divide them into sets and upload in few stages - in morning by your time, afternoon, early evening, late evening. You can even separate it in two days (Saturday and Sunday for example), where all uploads on second day will be moved on couple hours later. In that case most users will be able to easily get in time for one of the uploads.

1.5) Actually, since I saw earlier that Archi volunteered to help - the whole second part can be automated I think. If he can make something similar to ITH, but that will accept each answer only 5 times - than the whole thing with commenting and whitelisting can be skipped. And I have no idea how difficult or time-consuming to create such thing, so Archi, I'm sorry for hypothetically dragging you in, I'm just assuming by Touhou-event, Archibot and other examples that you are almighty when it comes to AI control and matrix-world dominance. So I thought I add this, just in case if that's some easy quick coding

2) From what I saw, there were quite a few suggestions about screenshots and drawings. And I have an idea to combine them. You give as a few screenshots/pictures/sentences/words, and we have to make a screenshot in any game, that would look similar or match the theme or description. So it's kind of hunting for right conditions, then making (which not exactly drawing, but still creative process, that won't require any talent) screenshot. So here you go - all three ideas in one! ^_^ And you can choose who to whitelist yourself, or by people voting (for example Screenshot contest have working system on that). Or you can give us a set of keywords (ten or so), and we have to include as much as we can by using only three screenshots. Every matching word giving us one point. And then you can set bar on how much points is needed to be whitelisted. Or even better - whitelist everyone who participated, but the more points user have, the longer he can ride the train. In that case first you'll add on whitelist people with highest scores, make a GA and in description put a link for private train. When they all will enter that train, you change description on another private train train and add next set of users with not so great scores, and when they all join change again for lowest scores. I think three categories (like gold-silver-bronze) will be enough, with one-day time for joining. In that case golden group could join all GAs, silver two lower sets, and bronze only one set. If someone will miss his time, he'll could add you in steam for appropriate link. I think it could be really fun, but it'll have to be longer, not by that weekend. I think people will need at least week to make screenshots.

I am so sorry for big wall of text, I just wanted to make sure that it's clear... If it's not - just say, and I'll try to describe it's differently

Also, I'm sorry to hear about what happened with your first event... And I'm volunteering to help you with whatever idea you'll end up choosing without entering any GAs. Consider that as an act of goodwill and apology for my countrymen that ruined your first hunt. And I have free time and passion for events, so if you need any help at all - feel free to add me ^_^

I'm sorry to hear about the leak, I seen some of the games and that must have take a lot of money and your time to get/plan out! ;__;

As for ideas, its probably been mentioned tons of times but tournaments would be fun, creating a group on steam for people who beat your score etc. Also doing puzzle trains are always an easy way to do an event but leaks can happen :/

There are also nomination type events which reward active members, people with good ratios and helpful people etc

I mean I know it's not celebrated all over the world, but it IS Halloween weekend this weekend.

What about a Costume Contest? We had the user photo thread, follow it up with a user costume contest thread. Anything goes as long as it doesn't violate site rules. Could use in Game screenshots as well if you wanted to do it that way too.

Nice to see you still want to do an event after that :)

There are already so many nice ideas to choose from, I'll only add some general thoughts. First and foremost it should be fun for you to prepare and execute the event. Bad thing is, no matter what you choose, some will be left out. The good thing is, most of them won't mind at all and still be happy that others have fun :) So go with something you find entertaining/interesting/etc and don't feel pressured by time.
I see that JustArchie offered his help - accept it, even if only for some ideas how to keep bad apples away