When I started Geekzone a few years ago I didn't think I was going to meet so many good people around here.

With time and the help of an entire community, in special our volunteer moderators, Geekzone managed to capture a good audience in New Zealand and overseas. Numbers continue to go up, and discussions in our forums continue to attract hundreds of thousands of visitors every month. Those visitors come mainly from New Zealand, but also from U.S., Canada, Australia, the UK and smaller numbers from other countries.

I managed to make new friendships that span the globe. People who I've met over the years in our pizza evenings, coffee meetings and conferences everywhere.

When I saw we were approaching 500,000 replies in our forums, I contacted some of the local telco/tech companies and passed the hat around, asking for some prizes to distribute. The response was really good as you can see below

I intentionally did not announce there would be prizes, because we wanted some genuine post to win. Also we decided to give some "consolation" prizes to people who got close to 500,000 but not quite. So here are the winners and prize list!

• sultanoswing (500,00th - 1) will receive a Nokia 6700c courtesy of TelstraClear
• vinnieg (500,00th + 1) will receive a HTC Wildfire S courtesy of Telecom New Zealand
• lokhor (500,000th) will receive the following:
• HP Envy 100 printer/scanner courtesy of HP New Zealand
• MSDN Premium subscription courtesy of Microsoft New Zealand
• N300 Wireless Dual Band ADSL2+ Modem Router courtesy of NETGEAR
• WN2000RPT Universal WiFi Range Extender with 4 Ports courtesy of NETGEAR
• HTC Sensation courtesy of Telecom New Zealand
• Apple iPad courtesy of TelstraClear

To all three winners congratulations, and to everyone else thank you from the team for making Geekzone a great place.