How can we best improve the writing contests?

Voting is anonymous so there's no way we can do anything to recognise frequent voters ... there is a way to check who voted for whom but its a big PitA so i don't use it except to catch cheats, its certainly not something we're going to do all the time.

We won't be asking voters to critique why they voted for x and not y... we've had that extremely toxic paradigm before and it nearly killed the contests... there's a good reason why the contests are a 'no critique' space

We also won't be changing to a judging panel model - that's a massive pain in the ass for all concerned. They do do it that way over in dot com land, so if thats what you want i'd suggest you go enter over there

we could use the banners (like the one that says supporter) which are user group based - we could create one that says contest winner 2023 and add anyone who wins a contest in 2023 to it... then 2024 2025 and so on (with the proviso that a user can only have 5 banners so sooner or later they'd start dropping off especially if the winner is also a supporter, or staff or whatever)

we could also create hall of fame threads at the top of each competition to which winners are added with links (the benefit of that being that it could be done by anyone who can edit a locked thread..so mods, contest admins etc)

I'll talk to mods and thirdwind about those two and see what we can do

 

And recognition of writing success can by made in other ways... it can't currently be given using the medal system

 

tbh i didnt even notice that typo

 

Okay, I'm going to close this thread because frankly it isn't true that discussion is better than silence... from an overworked admin's perspective silence would be great ... every moment I have to spend replying to this thread and others like it is a moment I'm not spending on trying to keep the forum afloat, or god forbid on actually writing or having a life

We all know there are a lot of issues with the forum, of which the medals are just one... nearly all of them resolve to the fact that XF1 is a piece of junk that hasn't been updated since 2016 . To fix these issues we need to update to Xf2 (or other such modern software), to do that we need either Daniel to come back and actually take an active part in running his forum, or we need him to come back long enough to pass the ownership of the forum on to me/us/a.n.other who will...

Its also probably worth explaining that I don't have super admin access...only a very limited access to the back end, and the mods don't have back end access at all, they just have very limited powers in the front end to open, close, delete, move, merge warn etc.. so if you've been a moderator on xyz forum and you think we can do more... we can't... changing that also requires Daniel.