Results of the 4sysops member and author competition in 2018

Another IT year has passed, and it is time to announce the results of the 4sysops member and author competition. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all members and authors who contributed to our community for IT pros in 2018!

Author
Recent Posts

Michael Pietroforte

Michael Pietroforte is the founder and editor in chief of 4sysops. He has more than 35 years of experience in IT management and system administration.

Latest posts by Michael Pietroforte (see all)

Poll: How reliable are ChatGPT and Bing Chat? - Tue, May 23 2023
Pip install Boto3 - Thu, Mar 24 2022
Install Boto3 (AWS SDK for Python) in Visual Studio Code (VS Code) on Windows - Wed, Feb 23 2022

The member competition is based on activities such as wiki and forum contributions, news posts, likes, and blog comments. A complete list with all the activities and the corresponding points can be found here.

Our member of the year is Paolo Maffezzoli. He posted most of the IT administration news on 4sysops, he published in the wiki, often replied in the forums, and he also often contributed with blog comments. Congratulations to Paolo! You received the 4sysops 2018 member-of-the-year badge that appears on your profile page and in the forum. Find the complete member leaderboard of 2018 here.

Paolo Member of the year 2018

We don't have a prize for the yearly member competition, but members who compete in the monthly competition receive prizes of $100, $50, and $25. You can find more information of how you can win the prize and how to contribute to 4sysops here.

We also had an author competition in the year 2018. This competition is based on page views of blog posts and wiki docs. To take part in the yearly competition, an author had to publish at least six articles during the year. The winner of the yearly competition could have received $1,000, the runner-up $500, and the third place gets $250.

I wrote "could have received" because I am the winner, and I can't give myself the prize. I know it is a bit silly, and honestly, I would've preferred a different result. I really didn't expect this outcome because I don't have as much time for blogging anymore as in former times. However, I admit that I won the competition because of a few lucky shots.

I didn't write these articles because I found these topics so thrilling. The only purpose was to demonstrate that most admins still struggle with very simple things when it comes to PowerShell. Obviously, all of my topics were only of interested for beginners.

I think we are still very far away from a DevOps era, and maybe it will never come. DevOps is really only a topic for large organizations. However the vast most majority of IT pros work in small and midsized organizations that have no use for DevOps simply because they have no dev department, and standard GUI tools do all the automation. These admins reach out for help to the internet because Microsoft forces them to use PowerShell. I simply exploited this fact to get our author competition started.

Mohamed Waly posted 14 times last year, but it was just one blockbuster article that secured him the second place in the author competition. His article about the CredSSP encryption oracle remediation error was the second-most read post of all the 2018 articles. The countless bugs that Microsoft's Windows-as-a-service a model produces are really a blessing for IT bloggers who are good in finding workarounds.

The third place goes to Wolfgang Sommergut. Honestly, I think he was the best 4sysops blogger in 2018. Whereas Mohamed and I benefitted from lucky shots, all of Wolfgang's articles significantly performed above average. No other 4sysops author managed to this.

It is interesting to note that most of Wolfgang's topics were also PowerShell beginner topics. He just lacked this one blockbuster that certainly requires some luck. I also have to add that I chose most of the topics because I translated many of Wolfgang's articles from German to English. I somehow think he would rank better if he selected the articles by himself. He is going to do this in 2019, so expect more good stuff from Wolfgang on 4sysops. If you speak German, you should have a look at his site WindowsPro.de.

Here are the 10 most successful articles with their page views that we published in 2018:

How to install the PowerShell Active Directory module (wiki)
Views: 129893 - Author: Michael Pietroforte - Published: 10 months ago
RDP authentication error due to the CredSSP encryption oracle remediation error (blog)
Views: 75944 - Author: Mohamed A. Waly
Differences between PowerShell versions (wiki)
Views: 63432 - Author: Michael Pietroforte
Enable Remote Desktop remotely on Windows 10 (blog)
Views: 22528 - Author: Michael Pietroforte
Install Windows updates remotely with the PowerShell (blog)
Views: 21747 - Author: Dan Franciscus
Enable PowerShell remoting (wiki)
Views: 11619 - Author: Michael Pietroforte
Using Windows PowerShell with Ansible (blog)
Views: 10373 - Author: Brandon Lee
How to run PowerShell code in VSCode (blog)
Views: 10304 - Author: Michael Pietroforte
Stop or exit a PowerShell script when it errors (blog)
Views: 10153 - Author: Adam Bertram
Create a Docker container on Windows with a Dockerfile (blog)
Views: 8360 - Author: Josh Rickard

This leaderboard contains all authors who published on 4sysops in the previous year. As mentioned above, only authors who published at least six articles during the year had a chance to win one of the prizes.