Bringing real cash into it seems like a monumentally bad idea. Bragging rights via a unique icon does sound like a really cool prize though.

 

Perhaps someone that actually has some skill with photoshop would volunteer their skills to create an avatar for the winner. So you could pick what photo/idea you wanted and then have Spring Winner or something to that affect in it as well.

 

I think a little title underneath the username would be quite neat.

 

A specific user group, or maybe banners for sigs (similar to what one would see in CN) would be cool.

And as to using the travel fund for cash prizes...fuck no. Worst idea in the entire thread. People have donated to the travel fund to fund travel and meetups. Having a cash prize would just make the judging and competition acrimonious.

As to this whole idea, yeah I like it. Don't do it monthly, make it quarterly like was suggested. But set up an upper limit on the length of entry permitted. So that the judges don't have a million words to read through between the entries. Set a limit at 50k words or something. Long enough to be of substance, but not so long as to be prohibitive to the process.

For judging, setting some basic criteria that judges should include in their thinking would be fine. But specific points assignments is nonsense. Different folk care about different things. T3t may care more about grammar and spelling, but I want to see good style and believable characters more than I do perfect grammar.

And in order to keep up enthusiasm, I'd suggest not making the competition categories too specific. The whole idea above about specific plot bunnies or challenges...no. Keep it nice and simple, and broad, along the lines of Indi!Harry, or Dark!Harry, or Azkaban!Harry. Go back to basics, let authors have freedom thereafter to go where they will. That'll get more participation than some crazily specific challenge.

 

I hesitate to call for permanent judge positions... but if there were judges last time that got chosen for multiple stories and provided timely results, they may be good candidates for such a position.

 

I hesitate to ask for longer story lengths, since it's harder to judge long stories on specific parts. Plus, it could take quite a long time to read a 40,000 word story and properly judge it. I think it would be asking too much of them. Sure, it could be read in a day, but I feel sorry for someone who took the time to write that much, just for a judge to give a few lines of critique. Not saying that was the case, but it did happen (and there was a problem of judges going to far and thinking they were a pseudo editor). The second half of the contest sort of amended this problem by having the judges critique posted afterwards, and anonymously, but I think it should be something that is looked in to.

I think we could run into a time problem with the longer stories. I know I lost interest when several of the contests results were a couple weeks late, even when I was an entrant. Keeping shorter story times keeps the contest fresh and on the minds of the community, whereas if it takes a month to get a group of judges to judge 10 novelette length stories, it could be boring waiting around on stories you barely remember.

Perhaps we could use that to our advantage though. If we knew the topics ahead of time, we could at least be writing the next contest while the current one is being judged.

 

Certainly judges should, to a great extent, should be selected for their ability to dedicate enough time to properly judge all the entries. And people who volunteer as judges and fail to do so once, should not be allowed to volunteer in future unless they have an excellent excuse for failing the first time.

 

I think the idea of selecting more judges than strictly necessary and using a strict deadline is the way to go, as well as barring anyone that doesn't make the deadline.

 

Thats an interesting idea. Have maybe twice as many judges as we need judgements.

 

I agree with redundancy in judging. I'm also ok with having the next theme released in advance, but not the entire list.

About story length: 40,000 words shouldn't take longer than two hours or so to read. I very much doubt there would be more than one or two entries longer than 30k words anyways (assuming 500 words a day for two months). A week should be more than enough time for judging if you've got at least a few hours free time.

 

While we're talking about rebooting the contest, how about we work on the theme first, decide it and then figure out the logistics. The entrants get some extra time as well then.

 

Actually I'd say deciding the logistics is more important right now. It's the logistics that make the entire thing possible.

For a start, deciding the theme by democracy is a terrible idea. It'd lead to bad feelings, slow decision making and generally cause problems.

Work out how we're organising this first. Are the staff running it? Or a small group of volunteers? If the latter, I'm more than happy to volunteer myself for that and do my bit. If the former, could one of the staff step up and say that's how it's going down?

Once we know that, further details can be decided.

 

This is what I've been waiting for. I was interested in participating in the last contest but held off to see if the system was fair, punctual and actually resulted in useful feedback. Which it didn't. Hopefully this time will be better.

I've read through the thread and I'm going to answer to each in turn.

Quarterly vs Bimonthly
I personally predict that people will just get too damn bored with quarterly contests. Keep it simple, keep it fresh.

But I've noticed that, among the posters in this thread at least, opinion is split either way. Considering that neither option would be disastrous, I suggest a poll for everyone to vote on, who wants quarterly and who wants bimonthly. An additional poll should follow after the first round to see if people have changed their minds.

Judges
I think Perspicacity's idea of imitating a science journal's peer review system is brilliant. Their system has been around for decades and it's worked beautifully. I don't know exactly how it works but I'll trust Pers to tell us if we stumble over our own ignorance.

But I'd also like to add another layer (I have no idea if it's already in the system or not, if it is feel free to lynch me in the town square). I suggest three judges to each story, each gives the author a mark out of 100, then all three scores are delivered as a percentage. The writer will know who judged their story but not their individual contribution.

Benefits? Allows partial anonymity for the judges while also keeping the way open for private questioning and critique. Means that each judge can be held accountable by the other two in their group if they're not contributing.

Disadvantages? It'll take more organization and time. Could lead to one judge doing the work while the others slack off. Can't really think of anything else. Suppose that's your job isn't it?

A total word limit for each trio would keep judges from being overwhelmed. Say 60 000? That's two 30 000 word stories or three 10 000 word stories. Seems reasonable to me.

Challenges, prompts, themes etc
Keep it simple, stupid. We've got the TGYH thread for specific challenges.

But it might be possible to run two contests at once. The big contest and the small contest. The smaller one being once a week or once a fortnight, with less rigorous testing processes and a specific challenge.

This would be a good idea because it would give newbie writers somewhere to test themselves without throwing then in the deep end, then they can sort of graduate to the big contests when they believe they're ready. Perhaps you can only participate in the big contest if you've won a smaller contest? Two stages of distillation would give you a shinier result. Plus it would keep the usually stagnant TGYH thread fresh.

I'm just throwing out possible solutions here.

Prizes
A title would be perfect. "Second Prize Winner in the DLP Quarterly Contest" under my name would make me as happy as a pig in mud. Also the possibility of being put in the DLP C2 is tantalizing. Maybe if the winners had their stories put in the C2 and the Library by default?

No tangible prizes are necessary. Considering we're mostly Internet dwellers, we're the type to strive day after day for useless interweb points.

Thats all I can think of for now but I'll be watching this thread avidly. I really want this to get off the ground people. The fandom needs fresh meat, it's getting all diseased and cancerous from eating tween girl's erotic fantasies all day. The fandom is our baby, do you really want to let our baby die?

 

I'm not sure what kind of feedback you were looking for in the last contests. It was not set-up for you to improve plot or writing skill, but to test your skills as an author against others and be judged. If you want improvement as an author there's always WBA.

I was just rereading some of the older contest entries, and I've got to say. It would be nice to bring this back. I'd forgotten some of my favorite stories had come from those entries. Concentric Wavelengths, Geminio, and Reprieve among them. All awesome one-shots.

 

This is the worst judging idea. You want a judge to judge all stories or none of them to keep the judging fair.

 

Not all journals work this way, but with Nature (at least in 2006, the last time I published an article there), there was a hard deadline for getting one's reviews in. Typically, three, sometimes four reviewers are asked to review a manuscript. After a fixed time (21 days or some such), whatever reviews are received by the editor are forwarded to the authors, who have a set amount of time to respond, etc. By setting firm deadlines, it ensures that the process terminates in a fixed time, that there aren't indefinite holdups as reviewers hold papers hostage for whatever reason.

The dynamics enabling such hostage situations probably wouldn't happen here, but I think the principle of tapping more reviewers than are strictly needed and then going with what reviews are submitted at the time of the deadline would have merit. I know from experience that waiting weeks for a contest's outcome is the fast track to souring an author on future competitions. It's incredibly hard to drum up interest in writing a story for the next contest when one's story from the last is weeks overdue.

An idea that might be fun to consider is double-blind reviewing: hide the identity of the authors as well as the reviewers during the review process. This may encourage some of the newer members, who don't have as much name recognition, to compete knowing they're on a more level playing field. (Would some authors still have tells that reveal their identities? Maybe yes, maybe no.)

 

Why would that be unfair? Each story is being judged on its own merit not in relation to others.

Could you please explain? Because I honestly see no way this could be unfair. I recently completed the IB who use the same system and I found no problems with it.

And thank you Pers for filling everyone in on how it's done. I agree that the hostage thing won't happen, but the double-blinding idea sounds like a good idea.

We need to balance the time frame perfectly so that we get quality fanfics and the participants don't get bored.

 

I wholeheartedly agree with this ^^.

Also someone mentioned winning the smaller contest to possibly serve as a passage to participating in the bigger one. Not so much for that idea, everyone who wants to join and can whip up something within the deadline should be allowed, imo.

Someone should set a poll up for all the stuff we are debating (I'm not sure how) and can a mod confirm if anything's going to happen?

@Sacrosanct I think it would be unfair because different judges place emphasis on different things, hence having different judges for each entry eliminates uniformity, in that if all judges judge all entries, then their criteria is applied evenly to each story.

 

Then the way to solve that would be to have criteria to base the scores on as T3T suggested. And in any case wouldn't having multiple judges on one story balance out any biases each individual might have?

I just think that making every judge do every story is not logistically viable considering they'll be expecting longer stories.