Competition Results Please Read!

[Shockwave]

This is going to be a post of mixed emotions.
First of all I would like to congratulate everyone who entered the competition! I apologise for the slight delay in getting sigs done and prizes sent.

The mystery prize was an Amazon voucher of £10 for the top three placed entries.
As I won the competition I decided to bump my own prize down the line.

Tetra therefore gets £20 and Sledge gets £10.
Sledge, please do get in touch with your prefered Email address so I can send the voucher.

The competition was entered by 9 people, less than we have been having lately, if you count that 3 of these entrants are moderators of this forum it is clear to me that support for the comps is waning.
Is this summer slumpage? It could be. Usually most Summers there is a dip around this time.

The real sad fact is that only 16 people bothered to vote in the competition, they were;

Code: [Select]

chris
rbraz
yaloopy
ghost,
incognito,
paul,
sledge,
stonemonkey,
codeman,
combatking,
ninogenio,
sarek2k,
benny,
slippy,
jim,
shockwave.

Average people online per day here is about 40 unique users. Voting was open for 5 days.

Therefore I would like to congratulate everyone who entered and voted and thank you all very very much indeed, however there will not be another challenge for some time as I am dissapointed, not with the amount of entries, but the pathetic voting. It would have taken only a moment for people who didn't vote to do so. I don't see why we should have these challenges if the entrants are not supported by the visitors to this site.

[benny!]

That's truley sad. 16 out of 50 users voting is a very bad rate. I totally agree
with you, Shocky.

Maybe some of these users who did not vote may tell us why they don't
wanted to vote. It's not about blaming those users - it is just out of interest
and perhaps to help us improving the voting / competition rules.

[combatking0]

Maybe we could plaster the fact that voting is open on the front page when users log in.

Or maybe it was on the front page and I didn't see it.

Just an idea.

[benny!]

Maybe we could plaster the fact that voting is open on the front page when users log in.

Or maybe it was on the front page and I didn't see it.

Just an idea.

Hmmm ... a little reminder could be positive.


@SW:
Is there a functionality that supports this

[Shockwave]

Jim did it guys. He changed the announcement on the top right of the screen.

Let's not try and extract reasons why some people did not vote, that would be counter productive.

I just want to make sure that the next time a comp is launched that your hard work is rewarded and supported by lots of people voting.

Again I offer my congratulations to those who entered and my deepest thanks to those who voted.

[Sledge]

I suspect that a unified downloads page during the voting period would be useful -- a title, author, screenshot and direct download link for each entry and a link to the voting thread. The current system is a bit higgledy-piggledy with some entries coming off the forum servers, some via direct links and some via file-sharing sites. Given that the entry threads change order every time someone makes a new post, I can kinda see how checking out every entry could be a bit of a chore -- you have to flit around an awful lot and it's this (rather than actually casting a vote) that takes the time up.

We could give it a go next time maybe -- I have a bit of free (free) space from my ISP on which I could collate entries temporarily if it came to it, although a native page on the site would obviously be preferable.

[Shockwave]

Hosting is no problem Sledge, though it's very kind of you to offer some space and of course your solution is the most elegant. It boils down to time though.

Even though they are simple things, these comps do take a fair bit of time to organise.

As to the files being hosted in other places / attachments etc,  there are limits to file size uploads here, this is to make sure we don't run out of space. If I increased the forum upload limit to 1mb we'd be out of webspace in no time!

Honestly, there are people who post a 300kb screenshot to show a bug in a program ffs when a 10kb jpeg would do the same.

The showcase on the front page can handle up to a meg. Maybe I'll ban free hosting sites in the future for comps because they are shit.

Given that the comp runs over quite a long timespan usually, I will say again, 16 voters is not many. More people could have voted, the voting system has to work within the limitations of the software on this website too unfortunately so designing a custom page whilst perfectly possible is time that I don't have.

I will take some of that on board though, if and when I launch another competition, the voting page will hopefully be better with links and screen shots of each product on it.

In fact this was done previously in older competitions when this board was newly launched...

http://dbfinteractive.com/index.php?topic=358.0

I wonder if that's more the sort of thing you had in mind?

Something else that could be done is email submissions... I must stress again though, the problem was that people did not vote in sufficient numbers to justify the work that you guys put into your entries and my own work in organising the comp.

You might have hit the nail on the head though about it being a chore to go through all the threads to refresh the memory on what you are going to vote on.