That's an option. New members can't vote in contests, but we do currently allow them to enter the contests. I think that too has the potential to encourage new members to become more involved. I guess the big question here is which approach would do more to motivate new members to participate: allow new members to enter photo contests or require them to wait until they have normal site permissions?
In my opinion, make them wait. If they want to participate they will be a little more serious about it, and will be willing to wait.
I'm not really sure which option is best. Anyone else?
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I thought the goal was to cut down on the time involved with sifting through all the crappy pictures to find the ones worth voting on. Allow newcomers to vote, so they can feel like they are involved, and then once they attain a higher level of membership, hopefully by then, they will have read the rules,let them enter. It's not to disclude (sp? Is this even a word? But you know what I mean!
) anyone, but to give them time to understand the idea of the photo contest.
I like the idea, just not the wording. "Professional quality" will open up a great big can of worms for some people.
I would actually like to see a slow increase in total entries. Also, removing low quality images during the reduction phase is usually easier than removing images of higher quality. I do of course want to improve the quality of entries and the contest in general, but my real goal here is to improve the efficiency of the reduction phase. It may seem that the best way to do that is to reduce the number of entries, but that is not really the case. Once we get an entry count over 30 or so, the total number becomes a less significant factor. Dealing with 100 photos compared to 50 during the reduction phase might increase the time needed for me to reduce them by 20%-30%. The most time consuming part for me comes towards the end of the process where I have, for example, 15 good photos left to reduce but only 5 available voting slots. I want to be fair to everyone, but most of the remaining decisions at that point are subjective and that creates a lot of indecision. I'm the type of person that can waste a lot of time being indecisive if I'm not careful. One solution we're going to try is to bring in someone else to help me with the process, especially those final decisions that often take too much time.
The main reason we block new members from voting is to curb cheating. People will create new accounts to vote for their photos and we thought that by blocking those votes we could add integrity to the contest.Allow newcomers to vote, so they can feel like they are involved, and then once they attain a higher level of membership, hopefully by then, they will have read the rules,let them enter. It's not to disclude (sp? Is this even a word? But you know what I mean!
Perhaps this would be an appropriate place for a tournament-style voting process? Or perhaps not. I dunno.
Unfortunately, dishonesty is a reality. And it shouldn't be, but it is. Maybe make the new members sit out for the first month before allowing them to vote. Then established members (and up) are the ones permitted to enter photos. This is possibly a good place for "hiding" the entries until it's time to vote?
Smarty-pants!!I'm sorry, did you say something?
