I am all for a second bout, but think we have more important issues to sort out before discussing themes (as talked about in the other thread). Monsters is a good theme though!
To be honest, we lost a lot of momentum this round due to two things. First of all, the submissions being fragmented - we had some submissions with a lot of pictures, others with only one. Some were displayed separately from the text, others were displayed with the text. Some were embedded, others were only displayed as file-links and opened locally. It's been rather hard (and a lot of clicking!) to keep track of what goes where and which submission is the greatest. Secondly, time between publication and poll opening sort of killed the buzz. We had a good thing going in the build-up to publication. After that, it sort of died. Also, there was no easy way to keep track of the comments (if any) made on each submission which further lead to the feeling of a stalled event. A thing like this needs ongoing interaction and a tight schedule to keep the juices flowing.
I think we should consider the following changes:
* Keep everything on the forum There's nothing gained from having things hosted and displayed elsewhere. This is our competition and our place, it makes sense to have it here. It would also make discussion easy (both posting and reading).
* Stricter rules for the submissions. This to reduce the amount of work for the competition admin to post the submissions and also to make the entries easier to view. Say, each entry may contain 4 jpg at 1024x768 each. Any text submissions should be in a word document. Files should be named by a common standard.
* Voting starts when the entries are posted. I see no reason to have a window between posting the entries and voting. Voting should run for a week, tops! Any more than that and things start to drag out.
* Voting by ranking polls. Each entry could be posted as an individual poll, containing the whole entry on display (not linked or attached, it really should be displayed in the thread). With the poll options, each forum user can rank each entry 1-5 (where 1 is the lowest and 5 is the highest). Yes, users will be able to score each entry with 5 points, but why would we do that? We don't keep open registrations on the boards so there's no great risk for vandals. Ideally the poll results shouldn't be visible until the voting is closed. When the voting is over, the scores are made public and tallied by the Gobbo commissioner(s). Each entry would have a final score being the sum of all their votes. The results are published in a separate thread. I found it hard to pick out a single favourite and would prefer if I could just rank each entry. Another positive effect of this is we can get comments and discussions going in individual threads, keeping the competition alive for the whole run. Finally, we're not that many active users on the forums. Allowing each entry to be graded like this would give us greater granularity in the results.
* Why keep entries anonymous? Most of us have distinct styles and fetishes anyways, and it's not hard to recognize the photo setup of many of the entrants.
* Enforce the deadlines. Yes, the more the merrier - but waiting a few extra weeks for people to get their entries in isn't adding to the fun. It's not a matter of impatience, but if nothing is happening people move on and focus on the competition is lost and the nerve and excitement dies off.
I applaud the initiative, and appreciate the effort made but in the end I think round 1 was an anti-climactic affair. I understand the reasons why, and the limitations we faced and I'm not looking to hang neither Orlygg nor Steve. =) I might come off a bit ranty here, but I've been writing the post over the course of three hours while watching our 20 month old boy demolish the house so I couldn't focus on anything but getting my point across.
I'd be happy to help organize round 2, setting up the infrastructure and general rule sets.