Ghost in the Machine

We interrupt our regularly scheduled entry because there are some strange things going on with the contest submission form.

On Friday, I received a submission in my Outlook inbox. Which is strange, given that the form is set up to send to Brian's email address. It wasn't forwarded to me or sent directly from the person--it came through the Yahoo webhosting route. This particular entry was either a very late or early Best First Chapter submission (which we are no longer accepting since this year's deadline was March 1 and we don't start taking entries for next year till September 1). So I figured this person had gotten creative and figured out some way to hack the submission form in an attempt to avoid disqualification, even going so far as to figure out my work email address and sending it to me.

Then today, there were three submissions for the Short-Short Story Contest in my inbox. I am confused.

Let me back up and say that, although I'm not a very tech savvy girl, somehow I know just enough to put me in positions where I am responsible for various tech-related things. This is true at my job and with Brian. It's a little bit scary, but I seem to be able to scrape by and figure things out as I go. We built his website together; I am his web author. He tells me what he wants on paper, and I try to execute it electronically.

So whatever is wrong with the form is my doing. I just can't for the life of me figure out what I did. I updated Brian's website (see the new dog pictures under the kayaking photo gallery) and started this blog on Monday, so maybe something weird got embedded in his site then. But that wouldn't explain the Friday entry.

I've gone back into the Yahoo Sitebuilder software, and everything looks correct. The form is set up to mail to his email address. I don't see mine anywhere on the site. Yet I ran two test entries, and both came to my email, not Brian's. Eerie.

I guess it isn't such a big deal really, except it has me wondering if entries could possibly be sent to other strange email addresses at random. Is someone in Australia receiving mysterious short-short stories? And how would we ever know?

If anybody out there has any suggestions, I'm all ears.