we're contacting the winners now.
technical note:
the drawings are decided by a service provided by the NIST, the Randomness Beacon. this is a public source of randomness updated once a minute, and all of the results remain available in an archive. the idea is that no one (especially not us) has control over it, and it's available as public record.
the random output from this service at the moment of the end of the raffle (2019-01-11 11:59PM CST (UTC -6)) was supposed to be used to select the winners. however, last night when i went to find the winners, i realized that the service is offline due to US federal government shutdowns!
i never expected that this would reach all the way to our forum's raffles.
so instead, i settled on the last-available output from the service before it shut down (2018-12-26 16:07 UTC -0, pulse index 220394) as the value used to choose the winners. while this information was available during the raffle (instead of only after), i hope that choosing the last-available value instead of something completely arbitrary demonstrates that i am not cherry-picking values to manipulate the results.
thank you