No you don't have to do challenge layouts. I was trying to point out that if you do a challenge layout, it does count towards your page count. I'm working on flusing out the details of the contest right now. Your Grunt pages have qualified you for the contest but but I hope that won't stop you from sharing more!
Since it is really difficult for me to keep track of every message on the newsgroup, I'll be creating a form to fill which will require people to give me links to the qualifying layouts, their screen names so I can check google and make sure that they have posted more than one sentence posts on a regular basis since mid-December when the contest was first announced. I'll also be contacting past swap hostesses to make sure that the people that qualify for the contest, have not flaked in the past 12 months. This is quite obviously a reward type contest for faithful and regular participants of RCS. For those of you who are joining us now and are thinking that you can't participate in this contest, I am planning another contest for later on in the year and there are tons of things that we do on RCS that you also need to be a regular poster for.