(My opinion): If no author can vote, it’s fair. If all authors must vote and exclude their own fic, it’s fair. If voting is optional and the forerunner votes for the second place, but the second place does not vote and then wins, it’s unfair. That’s the conflict, for me. Either the winner can make themselves lose, or they can vote tactically rather than in line with their best judgement.

 

You're technically not wrong, but I suppose I dont worry too much about strategic voting. I mean technically if you were my friend you could also vote for me to give me a boost and not who you thought would win, or any of a dozen other possibility. That sort of thing is always possible. You can't fully prevent it, just hope people won't be asses.

I dunno. I suppose Im assuming most people in a friendly competition like this are going to be straight forward. Id let them vote excluding their own and if it starts to cause problems we can always stop it then.

Purely selfish thinking I suppose. Ive contributed a couple of times and I *liked* being able to review fics and then vote for the ones I thought was amazing. It was just... I dunno.. fun? Actually, weirdly, when I was competing it got me *more* active and involved in reading other peoples stories. Maybe cause I wanted to see what they did with the prompt instead of me.

I wasn't too worried if that meant someone else was going to get an extra vote compared to me. Heh maybe thats just me though. But yeah my vote would be lets let authors go for it and if it starts to cause problems always easy enough to stop. Id trust ched or whoever else to keep half an eye on things. If folks start to abuse voting (and id hope they wouldnt thats idiotic) Ill trust their judgement when they say its not working. Which would be a shame.

 

I'm not sure I agree on your point about the friend. We dont ask for explanation for your vote or people to justify it. You just need to review everything then vote. I mean you are right realistically you have to have reviews that make sense and I dont think anyone would just vote for a horrible fic cause it was their friend... but the same thing is true of authors. They have to give the same amount of justification for their vote as you do for yours.

Your point about the small vote differences is true. but again I suppose I just assume people ARENT trying to cheat the system lmao. Naive of me?

I mean it will be what it will be. I suppose im mostly arguing because *I* would like to write stories. And *I* would like to also be able to vote for the cool things I see other people write and thus give them support. And id like to not have to pick between the two. So yeah, I admit there is a selfish element here heh. But I still think knowing the DLP folks whom I see writing stories regularly, I dont think they are the sort to abuse this.

End of the day I suppose ill be ok with whatever ched decides though.

 

Yeah, I don’t think it’s malicious, certainly. And the answer here, for you, would be that if you write a story, you must vote too. And that’d be fine. However, in the competition I ended up winning by a point, the second place voted and I didn’t and that would have secured me the win when it was more in doubt. In this most recent round, Fitz has won, and she voted 4 and 1 points. If she’d voted five, she would have voted herself out of the lead at that time. So it does happen.

 

I didnt want to clutter the other thread now that voting has started. But I did want to bring up again... the more I think on it, the more I think the competition could benefit from having this not be a sub-forum. I think both from submissions and for reviewing. Like I was just talking to a friend I have who is also a DLP member and asked if he was going to review... he didn't even know the competition was going on because he didnt see the sub-forum.

So I dont know. Is this an easy change or a difficult one? Just thought it would be nice to have some discussion on if we could make the forum visible from the main dlp screen

 

Can you or dear, sweet, kind @Sorrows, if she’s not busy, do a banner about this round of voting, maybe? I think sorrows has done them in the past and it did help.

 

banners are good. Honestly, I think just not making it a sub forum (so you constantly see the recent posts as you scroll down) would help too

 

Yeah, I don't want to hit this point over and over in case its been decided, but in order to find the entries this time around you had to navigate through three sub forums (meaning four clicks away from the main page). Add to that the fact that Story Competitions is a sub forum of the WbA (for no immediately obvious reason, seeing as WbA is a place for feedback and Story Competitions are... competitions), and you make it so that only the people who had reviewing/reading the entries in mind already got to them at all. And I feel its such a shame, because the comps could be a great way to get authors from different sites to take part in the community, if only they were advertised a little bit better. It's getting a bit sad to see the rounds receive fewer and fewer submissions, to the point where you guys have to extend the deadline just to break the three story mark, and even sadder to see always the same four of five people dropping in to make comments. Like, c'mon, is this a forum for writing (and reading) fanfic or not.

 

Yeah I totally blanked on this forum for the above reasons.

It’s more work, but maybe @ anyone who has expressed interest at the key milestones.

 

I'ma be honest, I really struggled with this prompt, then I had inspiration for two ideas about 10 days ago, at the same time Valheim came out to suck up my time.

So for me personally, a combination of a hard prompt (For me), and a late time crunch.

 

I'm not sure about everyone else, but I didn't submit an entry due to the prompt as well as life circumstances. I had some interesting ideas, but none that I can write into a satisfying short story. The prompt is a bit bland and a bit too restrictive, in my opinion. It didn't really strike my imagination. Writing a story with an actual plot regarding this prompt, in around 15000 words or less, was a bit challenging for me. Whereas, when I read the previous prompts, I was struck with a lot of ideas instantly. I can't speak for others in the forum, of course. My tastes are probably different than most here, since I'm an r/hpff regular. Also, I was a bit busy this month studying since I had an important exam at March 13th.

I'm not sure how you could increase interest. The announcements worked for me. One of the first things that greeted me when I joined the website was the announcement for the competition, which I was initially interested in joining. The only thing I can think of is to promote the competition to the subreddit or discord etc., before the voting for prompt takes place, so that we could get a prompt that appeals to a wider audience, and thus, more entries. I'm not sure if this is a good idea though - take my opinion with a grain of salt since I'm a bit new here and hence unfamiliar with the culture.

Edit: Also, while I didn't write an entry, I would be happy to write reviews/critiques for the entires that have been submitted. Am I allowed to do that or is that only for authors who submitted an entry or established authors in the community?

 

Maybe a page on DLP that shows the winners of the competitions & how many times they've won? Or a star/badge which indicates that someone was a competition winner? I think we're getting to a point where a few regular submitters have won multiple times... maybe that dims the lustre of the competition for them. Some kind of incentive should definitely be considered imo