The analogy is more like "15 out of 20 kids had identical free response answers on this test (and all of you forgot to put your names on your tests), so now all of you lose recess"
OK if you wanna go with THAT analogy - you've got to add that right before asking the free response question, the teacher had everyone say what present they wanted for the holidays. Then immediately asked, "what is your favorite holiday activity?"
It's called priming. The kids will be thinking about that awesome thing they want, so they're more likely to reply "open presents" when asked what their favorite holiday activity is.
And in the case of chickensmoothie - well, family and friends get together around this time of year, and people are going to talk about chickensmoothie giving away super awesome pets now, or maybe people will walk in on a user collecting their stuff on here and ask "hey what's that?" Then, if they have any interest at all in pet sites/adopts/etc, they're likely to join. Whereas normally during the year, Chickensmoothie is probably not really brought up all that often in normal conversation, nor is there a natural opportunity to "spread" it to your loved ones you don't get to see often.
I mean I've been friends with someone I met through a different pet site for over a year now. Obviously we both like this sort of thing. It NEVER came up until we got together on the 17th that she even had a chickensmoothie account, and it only came up because she was checking stuff here and mentioned excitedly about the 18th being a special day for rares.
I decided to give it a try solely because of that conversation, and because I now knew that there was an opportunity to "catch up" a bit to all the older players. All that initial excitement I had to see if maybe I could snag something really great and start my game here off with a bang - it's gone. I'm basically just checking back to this thread on the very rare chance that perhaps someone in charge will see it and re-think their policy, because it IS unfair to legitimate new users.