Let me understand this: the person we're talking about didn't win because people thought they had the best entry but because people were trying to prove a point by voting for less popular (and for a good reason) entries?

I voted for this one:

Spirit of the Season by AvidArtist
www.COLOURlovers.com

because I liked it

I didn't vote for all of their entries. I didn't see a certain user and go I'm not voting for them because of who they are, and if I HAD done that I sure as hell wouldn't be commenting on their thread. I offered constructive criticism to them and that is really what I feel in my heart about why they may not have won.

Perhaps I should send a 'love note' next time instead.

He happened to be the fortunate one for sending the notes. You'd tell me it was indeed something different...
OrigamiMei wrote:

Let me understand this: the person we're talking about didn't win because people thought they had the best entry but because people were trying to prove a point by voting for less popular (and for a good reason) entries?
Doesn't that seem a little cruel? Like basically using someone as a pawn in a game?
Wouldn't it be better just to avoid contests altogether than to do something like this?

Dishonesty is certainly a problem. And I do think popularity issues are a huge problem. I have problems with the contest structure as is, however. I could work with it, was willing to accept it, (largely because I thought it possible to become more popular, which is really lame of me), before this issue of potential cheating came up. But now that it has, how do we put the worms back in the can?
Who wants to enter a contest where most entrants have little to no chance of winning against entrants who know everybody and have been fixtures since maybe before 2005? That was bad enough, but now who wants to enter a contest where a total unknown with mediocre work can whip 200+ votes out of thin air and no one will even answer the letters asking for an investigation? What is the point? I would be better off looking for contests where winning wasn't an artifact or a gimmick or a fluke, or something I had to walk away from because my 15 min. are up and I've gotten too big for the kiddy pool, while still losing. I would be better off away from the site entirely, learning 3D modelling, matte painting, heavy duty fractal generation or something. Why shouldn't Colourlovers become renowned for the highest standards achievable, where companies shop for new designers? You don't need incredible prizes for that, we were fighting to the death to design bookmarks, cripes. You just need an impartial contest with clear rules, and no insider advantage.
Are we content with a Colourlovers where top creators just leave after a while because there's nothing to hold their interests? Are we threatened by excellence?
I still want to know what those 100+ people found lacking in my designs. I still am horrified that we can disrespect all the lower entrants by not getting to the bottom of what happened up top in the voting.

Eighteyed... I have went round and round with people about how I think the contests should change. When Molly had that long discussion during the summer I think it was that seemingly got abandoned. Are there things that *should* be in place to have the community feel more harmonious about contests? Yeah. Such as limiting votes, limiting entries, anonymity, a separate creation and voting period... but no one wants to implement that. Along with the lovelies that come along and then poof they are gone, there should be something where you have to create a certain amount of patterns and or palettes before you enter. But that won't happen, because we do want new users to get interested and enter. I don't know. I'm pretty much over it...

I do think I entered a few too many designs, whattafeeling. But I did enter a few more because in watching the contest and voting away for the deserving my designs were lost in the huge bulk of entries. There are too many entries, that's the problem. It's hard to find the better entries in the mass of entries. It makes voting meaningless, unless you are prepared to sit for hours and hours reloading, to find the gems. Or you are an insider and know to look at the tags. But even with the tags, you can't see the best of the latest entries until they have three or more votes.

2 hours ago
Gabrielle Marie commented on Contest Critique
I just read the opions about the contests here. I think it should be anonymus.. so everybody get the same fair chance.It should not be a popularity test. It is about quality palettes and/or pattern.
Only for pattern making.. there are more skills involved and many hours of practise too to go to a higher quality level. Palettes are more about feelings and emotions of the moment.

I used to think that anonymity would solve the problem. But I don't any more. And here's why. Those of us who have been here long enough will recognize the work anyway, it's not that hard ( I can recognize template designers in the random pattern maker). The popularity issues will still be there. Even palettes! Now I want impartial judges from outside CL. It solves the same issue as anonymity: they don't know us from Adam, and don't care. They care about the quality of the work.
And all the entries should mount at once, having been entered in advance. That would get rid of any time advantage you get from entering earlier. And it would get rid of more and more and more entries being entered as the contest advances, clogging up the works.

What about this. What about one entry, and that's it? Put your best horse in play, and see where the chips fall. There would still be a ridiculous number of entries, but that would cut down on it some...

See, I think we're afraid to cut the number of bad entries, and encourage more good entries. I think you get better entries when you have more good entries. If you can load the randomizer 70 times and see almost entirely crap, that tells you you have a crappy contest that is not worth paying attention to, and it's boring promotion for CL. If you can load the contest and not be able to guess which will win because all the entries are so fantastic and different, none below a minimum standard, you'd be more engaged, that would win greater attention for Colourlovers. Juried art shows are better, they just are. Enter 10 entries, 5 are selected to be in the contest. By strangers. But not everybody who enters makes it into the contest.

How about this. Enter one piece. That determines whether you make it into the contest or not. If you do, you get to enter 4 more.

I think there should be 3 entries, just those. Like it's been done in the past. So it won't feel like spamming. So you can see everyone's entries easy, not like last contest that there were pages and pages of the just one member. Everyone should be to participate.

just weighing in. I think that the voting should be anonymous so that contestants with more time on their hands aren't spending their days posting badges to all the voter's pages. I've competed in two contests and both times tried to start out doing this. . . but omg, too hard to keep up. But I imagine that as often as I click on comments either in side bars or when visiting other people's pages, a lot of votes are generated that way. Actually, we shouldn't even have links to our entries. They should just go in, then randomly be generated on the voting pages. Don't need any way to drive traffic directly to our entries.

I agree with the frustration, though much of the art was really easily 100 votes better than my entries, some of the ones that hit the top were very undeserving.

I know that we would recognize the templates of o2bqueen and dazzlement and many others if we saw them, but that is not the same thing if you can only see 9 or so entries at a time and can click vote.

There were other problems with the random entries. Several times I spent 30+ minutes voting and trying to see my own entries. Every time I saw my entries, they'd all be on the same page. . . then none would pop up again for 30+ minutes. So chances were, if someone was sitting for a half hour voting session, I might get one vote out of it on one of my entries.

(oh, and I voted for the red one with the stripes from AvidArtist, but I actually appreciated it's simplicity and festive color scheme)

GabsGiggles wrote:

I think there should be 3 entries, just those. Like it's been done in the past. So it won't feel like spamming. So you can see everyone's entries easy, not like last contest that there were pages and pages of the just one member. Everyone should be to participate.

I agree with this. the amount of entries people can make for some contests is really crazy, and feels far from necessary. and it just means even more to look through.

I'd like to throw in that I feel that contests should be spaced further apart. Having contests with such frequency takes the real excitement out of the competition as well as causing constant tension in the community.

Not sure where the admin (other than Darius) has disappeared to, but I hope that someone from the CL team is reading this thread and taking into consideration the feelings that the current contest system have stirred up in our community. Though it probably won't do any good because, as Takeovercontrol pointed out, we had this discussion during the summer and not much was done about the situation.

At this point, we might as well save our emotions and energy for a more worthy cause.

Oh my:/ what did i come back to? It seems like the contests are creating heat again.

v I think she voted with a good mindset. Should be voting because you like it and not the person etc etc etc.

whattafeeling wrote:

I voted for this one:

Spirit of the Season by AvidArtistwww.COLOURlovers.com

because I liked it

I didn't vote for all of their entries. I didn't see a certain user and go I'm not voting for them because of who they are, and if I HAD done that I sure as hell wouldn't be commenting on their thread. I offered constructive criticism to them and that is really what I feel in my heart about why they may not have won.

Perhaps I should send a 'love note' next time instead.

Or I also agree with Mei about the part about avoiding the contest if the intention is to prove a point - because that's not the most mature way to prove a point. If you have something to address - say it and then deal with the criticism head on so you can explain your stance. If people don't buy it, then who cares right?

Or I also agree with several other people and gabs about spacing out contests.

I definitely like the idea of anonymous entries.

Or I might propose just getting rid of contests. :)

Side note: i'm getting a week off from work, so I'll try to frequent here during my xmas break! ^^ got lots to catch up to. anyone wanna update me on site changes etc? :D

LOL I like how you call out crap when you see it, but 'crap' is really subjective. what I see as crap may not be to people. . but it's more likely what you see as crap i see as crap too. One thing i didn't like was that you posted too many entries. It's cluttered and to me it looks like you don't know what you want, so you submitted all of them. You should decide on a couple to represent you! It should never be that you won because you posted the most number of entries, because, what does that say about your skill? A victory is sweeter if you only submitted one and people like that one. At least, those are my thoughts.
eighteyed wrote:

See, I think we're afraid to cut the number of bad entries, and encourage more good entries. I think you get better entries when you have more good entries. If you can load the randomizer 70 times and see almost entirely crap, that tells you you have a crappy contest that is not worth paying attention to, and it's boring promotion for CL. If you can load the contest and not be able to guess which will win because all the entries are so fantastic and different, none below a minimum standard, you'd be more engaged, that would win greater attention for Colourlovers. Juried art shows are better, they just are. Enter 10 entries, 5 are selected to be in the contest. By strangers. But not everybody who enters makes it into the contest.

You are talking about the same thing I was complaining about much earlier too. about how it's almost a requisite for you to aggressively promote and market your stuff to get airtime, traffic, votes and eventually popularity calls into play too, and I felt that was unfair, because it should be purely based on work, not person.
[email protected] wrote:

But I imagine that as often as I click on comments either in side bars or when visiting other people's pages, a lot of votes are generated that way. Actually, we shouldn't even have links to our entries. They should just go in, then randomly be generated on the voting pages. Don't need any way to drive traffic directly to our entries.

I, too, would like to get rid of contests, Fae.
Unfortunately, this won't happen because contests are a means of revenue for the website.
Maybe, if we do a charity drive and raise a million dollars to keep the site running, they'd do away with them? How shall we do it? Selling candy bars? :P

Actually. That got me thinking. CL should start a charity drive and channel the contest prizes to be donated to a charity of the winner's choice. Why not? It's good, and it takes away the nasty side of competition. It's all for a good cause. We've been .. OKAY I have been trying to promote good causes for some time now. It might actually raise awareness about under privileged people, animals, society issues. Or at least offer that option.

Contests should bring us together not to fight but to bring the best out of us to offer to the world, to pay it forward... and create positive publicity for us. And bring colour to the dull world. HAHA this is all creative tagline nonsense now.

OrigamiMei wrote:

I, too, would like to get rid of contests, Fae.
Unfortunately, this won't happen because contests are a means of revenue for the website.
Maybe, if we do a charity drive and raise a million dollars to keep the site running, they'd do away with them? How shall we do it? Selling candy bars? :P

That would be awesome, Fae. It would require tracking down companies that would donate products that are actually charity worthy, though.
Maybe someone can track down a charity which gives iphone covers and weird, tye-dyed tights to the needy. xD (That sounded a lot funnier in my head.)

THOUGH...come to think of it, the Betabrands contests would be perfect for charity! Many needy people could benefit from the shirts and socks.

How about with every competition x percentage of the sales of products that have a CL surface design would go to a charity. Maybe a charity that supports research on what Sunmeadow was suffering from.

^^ Good idea! both beta brand and percentage of sales. Now we have to pitch this idea to darius..