Contest 09/2017: FIGHT!

[Janina]

[Janina]

42 pictures so far!

But you can stil submit your own picture until Wednesday evening. The vote will not be held on Facebook this time but I will try to do this on the website.

I think the problem I'm having with the way the contests are set up is that they don't really promote any sense of community like they should. It only takes about 15 minutes or so to cook up a submission, but after that, there's like a three week waiting period where there's nothing happening, with no idea of what other people are doing. In my opinion a much better way would be to have people's submissions be visible for everyone to see right from the get go. It would give members an idea of what others are doing, which might eliminate duplicate ideas (like the four or five "Shining" submissions in the Stephen King contest), as well as give new members an idea of what quality is expected. It would also encourage members to give each other feedback, communicate with one another, and let their submissions inspire others. Again, in other words, build a community.

This is how it's done on another (not art related) forum I visit. There's an initial theme given, and people upload their photos to the thread. There's about a week submission period, followed by a week of voting through a poll. The winner gets to decide the theme of the next contest. Even if two weeks doesn't seem like a long enough time to you, there would at least be another contest right around the corner for people to jump into, and things would move along much quicker.

[Janina]

Thank you for your feedback. I'd prefer your idea with a more community centered system a lot, but the thing is... this is the way the contets were run for 7 years. When I started them it was a community driven thing: The images were discussed a lot because the contest gallery was part of this forum and there were many active users. But unfortunately during the last years the forum was visited less and less. I guess there is not much to talk about here and forums in general have a hard time because of Facebook and other social networks. So I had to abandon the forum contests because there were not enough people left who joined them. The amount of entries became way better since no registration is needed anymore.
I miss the community from the past... but since this is where we are coming from and it slowly dried out I don't see a way to make it work again. The forum has not enough members and new ones register rarely for the contests.

Regarding showing the pictures before the vote: This would be possible. What do others thing about this change? We did not do this in the past because users were afraid good ideas might be copied. But there are two sides and I get your point.

Regarding the timeframe: I am worried less people might join the contests if there are two per month, because this feels a bit too much. I'd ask the community (or what's left of it) for their opinion... but the main problem I am thinking of is something different: To be honest I don't think I'll find the time right now to manage two contests per month. It doesn't sound like much work, but it is getting difficult for me to run the SP-Studio while also earning enough money with my daily job. And I'd prefer to focus on SP-Studio updates. It's okay for me to run one contest per month, but if a contest runs only 2 weeks this means I'd have to find time to manage it every week (start the contest - moderate the images - upload them for the vote - announce the winners). This might be possible with a wordpress plugin that can make it easier for me... but I haven't found any yet. So even if the community would prefer 2 contests per month I don't know how to pull that off right now.

For now I will test the new on-page voting system this month and perhaps there will be comments. I hope this feels more like a community again... at least more than Facebook.

'Whatsapp' killed internet forums. People don't write in forums as years ago. It's a pitty.
A few years ago, here we had many threads about many themes. Now it's almost dead.

Two contests per month? I freak out just with the actual monthly contest...

[Janina]

I am not at home today, so the contest vote will start one day late. Sorry, but I want to be there in case something goes wrong. This means you have an extra day to submit your pictures.

[Janina]

The vote is online now! No Facebook anymore, so I hope this will lead to more voters.



http://www.sp-studio.de/contests/#vote

[Janina]

THE FINAL RESULTS:

Congratulations to Jeffrey, who is the clear winner of this contest!

1) 17 points: Glass Joe vs Mr Sandman fromPunch-Out!! (by Jeffrey)
2) 11 points: Captain America: Civil War final fight scene (by Scott Mungslsingh)
2) 11 points: Michelangelo and Klunk (by Daniel)
4) 9 points: Scorpion from Mortal Kombat (by Joey Walters)
5) 8 points: Mongo punches out a horse in Blazing Saddles (by gdmattman)



The winners were added to the and . The page with all contets entries can be entered through the Hall of Fame as well. Thanks to everbody for submitting poctures and voting! This time we had more votes than with Facebook or the forum, so I will keep this system without registration for now. The star system vor votes is not off the table but since I have not found a plugin for this we will have to use the "like system" for now. I hope you still enjoy the contests.

[Jareen2]

[Janina]

Ah, congratulations!

I used a new feature we did not have in the old gallery and sorted all the pictures by votes. So if you did not made the top5 you can still see where you landed: http://www.sp-studio.de/contests/contest-092017-fight/

[Jareen2]