ATS Photo Competitions: POLL

G'Day.

It appears that I am going to be handling our Photo/Avatar competitions for the immediate future. Umbrax, who has done an amazing job over the past year with these, has asked me to step up and take the reigns for these competitions, that I know our members desperately love. Believe me, he did not have to ask twice as I've been chomping at the bit.

The purpose of this thread is basically to get an idea of what our membership is looking for in regards to our competitions. From what I see, we have two options. We certainly are not restricted to these, and I am more than happy to hear more suggestions, but I present these two for now.

Photo Competitions

These are random photos that we could upload each month. Umbrax ran a series of these in the past, and I know that I thoroughly enjoyed them. We could slap a new theme each month, as well as a new image. Or we could try what we've been running with lately.

Avatar Competitions

These are a lot of fun and they've been drawing a lot of attention. I have no problem sticking with these, but I thought we could hear some feedback from our members.

The way I've looked at this is, the Photo Competitions allow our Artists more of an opportunity to express their creativity. The images are larger than avatars, and well, you have something presented to you. What you choose to do with it is your own free will. We could flip flop from month to month. Use a random photo one month, and then try an avatar competition the next month.

We are here to Deny Limit. Whatever you want, I am here to offer.

What This Thread Is!

This is an opportunity for members to express their opinion on what type of competitions we can run. Whether it is photo competitions, avatar competitions, or any other competition, this thread is here to offer a voice. Another question I ask is, how often should we run these competitions? I would be strongly opposed to anything less than monthly. Weekly, or bi-weekly is too often, in my opinion, and will result in immediate satiation. If we run them monthly, we can keep members interested.

What about more than one submission? Should members be able to post more than one submission?

What This Thread Is Not For!

We are not here to discuss themes of possible avatar competitions, or any other specific that could give anyone the upper hand. Myself, and other staff members, will collaborate on themes for each competition, and they will remain a secret until I announce the competition.

IF you have a suggestion, you can contact me via u2u with the suggestion. I will not respond to it, and I will not indicate one way or another if I plan to use it, but I would say keep your eyes and ears open. Ultimately, we want to keep these as fair as possible.

But I'm always willing to listen to the thoughts and opinions of our members.

So what have you? I'll keep this thread up and running for about a week, and see what we can come up with. When, and if, I see a trend forming for what the members are looking for, maybe we can have something up and running for the beginning of April.

I think switching between Avatar and Photo contests would please everyone.

Week or Bi-weekly would be my favorite.

And I think 1 submission per member would the the most fair.

I would have to object to weekly, and even bi-weekly. That would be putting too much strain on our members to keep up, and on the staff to judge these. I did throw it out there for discussion, but be sure to look at this holistically.

Do you really think we could garner fifteen to twenty submissions every week?

The recent avatar competitions were running for about six weeks a piece.

My first thought about a monthly contest...I think it's too frequent... but that's my outlook. I'm thinking quarterly is better then it doesn't become a chore. Things that start feeling like a duty, they mislay their strong point- Fast. Just my thoughts on the matter, and you can do them just as often as you like, either way

Edit* error

[edit on 3/20/2007 by jensouth31]

Hey congrats on passing of the torch.

Photo Competitions !!! oh man, those are the most entertaining..... Not to be specific, the photo competitions is thoroughly fun if the theme is UpToDate.

The Avatar Competition is first-rate as always, the last one was good as it went with forum topic "Crypto zoology."

The number of submission per member doesn't matter to me, though that probably depends on how much work the judges want to do lol.

We could flip flop from month to month. Use a random photo one month, and then try an avatar competition the next month.

flip flop month to month sounds good.....

Maybe you could throw in, Photo Team Tournament or Avatar Team Tournament once a year
Who wants to be me on Team X lol.....

One submission per event and a monthly contest sounds good to me.

As for the photo contests, the working stock should be available in a decent resolution. Small to mid-sized highly compression jpegs can have a lot of noise and artifacts, and that makes extra work trying to cleaning them up, which comes at the cost of losing image data.

I appreciate all of your opinions and feedback. Expect to see something up and running in the first few days of April.