[rugrollers]

There was never much receptivity to constructive suggestions on this site before, at least in my experience, so now that they're soliciting them, here are a few ideas regarding the contest structure, based on five years' experience as a contributor.

1. Prize Structure
I'd be interested to hear what other contributors think about this, but to me the current structure has always seemed like too much of a jackpot, at least on HomeClips. Why should first prize win three times as much as second and more than all the other four combined? Sometimes there is nearly a dead heat for first place, which means the top two were liked almost exactly as much. It's fun when you hit the jackpot, which we've done a couple of times (still hoping to get paid on the one last month...), but finishing just a hundredth of a point or two below #1 under the current structure is really frustrating, and this also probably encourages attempts at cheating or rigging.

A minor adjustment would be something like $1000 / $700 / $500 / $400 / $300

More interesting, and reflective of scoring, would be an algorithm that allocated the pot proportionally to the top five scorers depending on how high they scored in relation to one another. So if the top contri won by a mile it might get $1300; if the top two were nearly tied they might get $900 and $800. This could be done in a variety of ways mathematically. The current distribution of the pot at any given time could be displayed with the rankings overview.

2. Final Scores
Since there is always a lot of volatility during the first day or two and sometimes more after a contri is published (again, I'm basing this only on HomeClips) -- and recently that volatility has become more extreme for some reason -- why not give scores a few days to settle after the last day of the month, i.e., keep the scoring open for a set number of days beyond the end of the contest? So that contris publishing on the last couple of days get a realistic score. Possibly this is already done, but as far as I know the official policy is that scores are final at the end of the last day of the month. (The rankings overview for the previous month would thus continue to show until voting actually ends.)

3. Scoring Options
Since all of the top fifty or so contris currently score above a 4.00, the five-point scoring structure has the effect that when a viewer gives any of the better contris a "very good" score of 4 instead of a "superb" it actually lowers that contri's average score, and more so the higher it is currently scoring. So if the viewer liked the contri they would have done the contributor a better favor by not voting at all. I don't imagine most viewers realize this. So why not try a ten-point voting scale? Commenters on the best contris often express a wish for more choices at the top. I guess there's no way of knowing in advance whether this would just end up with everyone giving nearly all "10"s, and the top fifty contris scoring above 9.00, but it's worth a try to give people a little more opportunity to express their particular level of enthusiasm for a contri.

4. Contest Visibility
We discovered only recently that although we have lots of enthusiastic supporters, many of them regularly forget to vote. I had actually suspected that a fairly small proportion of viewers do most of the voting, since I myself rarely voted before we started contributing, despite viewing reams of clips over several years. I think this is because the contests aren't really given much visibility on the site. For instance, site visitors could be reminded to vote for their favorites when they enter the site toward the end of the month. The current rankings could also be displayed on the main page instead of separately, or at least the link could be more prominent. There might be other ways of making the contests more high-profile that others can think of. I think this might also create a bit of buzz and excitement for viewers.

5. Scores Display on HomeClips
This is specific to HC, because I think it was already there on other sites, but a contri's current score should display on its front page, not only on its comment page. This would also direct viewers' attention to the scoring element.

Bonus Suggestion: View Counts
This one I've suggested to hc-contri in the past and been told it was in the works -- like three years ago... Since most people contribute partly out of exhibitionism, they would probably really like to know how many people are seeing their contris. (This goes for us.) View counts seem to be a really basic element of much web software (e.g., this bulletin board), so how hard could it be to set that up?

Addendum
I'm fully aware that the VW team has their hands full just getting the site back up and running, so I was actually a little surprised to see them soliciting our "wish lists." I certainly don't expect to see any major changes in the immediate future, until things settle down, but it would great if admin could keep track of suggestions that seem to have significant support or potential and put them in a sticky where they explain why they do or don't think they are a good idea or feasible or whatever and what their plans are. Otherwise they will just get lost in a thicket of BB threads, I'm afraid. (And this BB is anyway probably temporary, I imagine.)

Doing this would in itself demonstrate a huge improvement on the old Igorian regime, where suggestions would usually be ignored and/or sneeringly shot down either by Igor or (more frequently a few years ago) anonymous trolls that always seemed suspiciously in harmony with Igor's tone and opinions.

So thanks for this opportunity to provide input, and we look forward to hearing other perspectives on these ideas.

Rug Rollers

[georgiadawgs]

I totally agree on the view counter. It would be hot to know how many times a pic had been viewed. It helped a lot on the tit flash site, having it on the other images would be a great addition.

[oberon3]

These are excellent suggestions...

[oberon3]

Prize structure - Agreed, similar to one of my other suggestions.

Final scores...how about this? 5 days before the scoring period ends, contris can be submitted but votes on them count in the next round of scoring... that means you don't get screwed out of a good vote even if your post is on the last day of a scoring period.

Options - 10 point scale sounds good to me

Visibility - similar to my other idea on giving people credit / points for commenting, give credit for voting too.

[gadgetVW]

regarding you point # 2.

I do agree that the final scores are not realistic for a couple of reasons.
1) the last day cut off is a bit short
2) I don't know about the majority of users, but I know that I typically only view a contri once. The day it is posted. Therefore, it often gets compared to the other contris of the day, not the other contris of the month.
3) it also means that the vote volume is limited to the number of people who view that day. if it happens to be a holiday, many people might not view the contri at all.

My suggestions:

1) is to post the top 20? scoring posts for a period of time (10days) AFTER the close of the contest, and start the voting over, so we can vote on the best of the top runners to actually win. This would have to be prominently displayed during this period.

2) relate the vote count to the number of viewers, so lower view count does not mean a lower vote score overall.

[VWSupport]

Just wanted to bump this back up there, I would like some more input into this by our regular contributors, and possible contributors. Also going to have a thread like this get going on the Explicit BBs as well.

[rugrollers]

Just wanted to bump this back up there, I would like some more input into this by our regular contributors, and possible contributors. Also going to have a thread like this get going on the Explicit BBs as well.

Nice to see these now-ancient suggestions exhumed from the early days of the BB -- June 12th, when Katherine created the "Suggestions and Changes" section and invited our input... Well, the wheel turns!

My concern, though, is that no one is really on this BB anymore, and if they are they don't check the suggestions section.

Anyway, I wanted to clarify a couple of things.

GadgetVW (and others who have suggested here and elsewhere that late-in-the-month submissions get lower scores): Scores are averages and not cumulative, so it doesn't really matter how many votes you get. The way the system worked previously, you had to get past a certain minimum threshold number of votes in order to show a score at all. But this was never a problem -- even contris posted on the last day of the month would quickly show a score if they were among the better ones. The real problem is volatility. I.e., it doesn't take many votes to swing a score during the first day or two, so a contri might start at 4.88 at midday of day one and plummet to 4.73 by the end of the day -- an extreme example, but that's what happened with the last contri we submitted to HomeClips. Fortunately it was published on May 26th so it had a few days to settle out a bit higher and win the contest. Beyond the first day or two of volatility, it is actually mainly the case that contris sink a bit over time if posted early in the month. Several years ago this was such a strong tendency that all the top contributors were posting at the very end of the month (on HC anyway), so they must have tweaked things somehow to disadvantage last-minute entries or advantage early ones.

I say this partly to put it on record, in case those who are now in charge of the scoring system were not familiar with how it used to work, and partly to further explain the need for a few days of voting after the final day of publication. I think this should still be the last day of the month, but that voting should then stay open for five more days and some publicity should be given to the contest and the list of top contenders -- "last chance to vote!" -- so that viewers who might have forgotten will be reminded to do so. I don't think it is realistic to take the top 20 and start from scratch, for the very reason that GadgetVW states, that most people only view most contris once and there won't be enough interest to go back over the past month's contris all over again -- vote totals will be even lower and volatility higher.

I have understood from discussion on both boards that there was a problem with fewer and fewer viewers voting over time, i.e., in recent years, which further underlines the need to somehow make voting more prominent or fun or rewarding.

My strongest priority among the suggestions I made originally would be a flatter award structure, and more awards would also be a good idea: say $1000, $800, $600, $500, etc. to $200, which would make seven prizes per contest (in VW).

Rug Roller

[nikki2012]

Rug Roller has some great suggestions, and I certainly hope the changes they suggest are adopted. I have listed a few of the ideas they have suggested (maybe not word for word) and a little of my own that I would love to see put into place.

1. The gap between the prizes is a bit extreme. There really shouldn't be more than a difference of $200.00 to 300.00. And I really think a gap of $300.00 is a little large also; however, it's certainly better than having the 2nd place prize be only half of the 1st place award, especially when the difference in the scores can often be as little as hundreths of a point.

2. The contest definitely needs to be more visible to get more votes. Maybe it would help to make the voting options more prominent.

3. I would love, love, love to see a viewer counter. My boyfriend and I love to read the comments because it's so hot to see that viewers are enjoying our contris, but not everyone who views contris posts comments (which can be a good thing if comments are nasty).

4. Are there any voting rules? If so, it would be nice to see those somewhere, or at least an explanation of how the voting works. Also, what do other contributors think about implementing a maximum number of votes per IP address for each contri?

5. And yes, the score on the ranking page should reflect the latest score like the comments page does. It's misleading when there's a delay between seeing the actual score on the rankings page.

[Vanessab]

There are some good suggestions on here. I agree that the contest could be made much fairer, more sporting and more encouraging to new contributors.

Here are my comments on the discussion so far plus few other suggestions:

1. Flattening the prize scale would be a great move, both on the free side and the pay sections. The proportional prize system is a nice idea - very fair - but perhaps might lead to too many disputes.

2. One of the worst aspects of old contest system was that often half the prizes would be won by contri's published in the last few days of the month, and usually by the same people month after month. There's nothing more discouraging to contributors (particularly new ones) to sit up in the ranks for a few weeks and then get knocked down 3-4 places in the last few days. It's much better for the viewers and the site itself to have contri's posted earlier in the month, so why not encourage those who do so? Setting an earlier submission cut off date could work, but perhaps others here have some ideas on how else to combat this problem.

3. Set some annual individual prize limits on a per section basis to open up the competition more.

4. Giving the current status of the competition more visibility on the front page would be good.

5. Allow contributors to delete abusive comments on their posts, and find a way to encourage more viewers to flag inappropriate comments .. eg. you could add a little pop up note near the comment entry box requesting that people review the comments either side of their post and flag any abusive ones.

6. A view counter would be great.

Cheers
Vanessa

[housemd]

They would need income first from accepting credit cards, before they can afford to pay out prizes?

[VWSupport]

Income or not, we are still responsible for paying out prizes as we promised such. Prizes have already been paid out, and prizes will continue to be paid out, you may check with the contributors here if you have any doubt about this and I do believe they will be willing to confirm. I have answered your question about credit cards in your other post.