Mechanics of photography competition: voting etc.

For the initial implementation of questions, the following will be true:

• Questions are a type of conversation
  
• The first comment is the question, i.e. "This week's theme is architecture, which is the best photo?"
  
• Each subsequent comment is a stand-alone comment containing an "answer", i.e. a photo
  
• Each "answer" can be voted on... you can only vote once per comment, but you can vote on as many "answers" that you want
  
• The sum of all votes for an "answer" will be visible, i.e. 5 upvotes and 2 downvotes = a score of 3
  
• The "answers" are all ordered by score, the highest one first
  
• A moderator or the person who created the question, may select 1 of the answers to be the "accepted answer", i.e. "winner".
  
• Because all of the comments on the question are "answers" to the "question", "Post reply" will be changed to "Post answer" and in-comment "Reply" will be removed
  
• Unlike all other types of discussion... clicking a Question from a forum or search will always take you to the first post, the question.
  
  

That's what I'm building... a type of thread, in which the comments are not guaranteed to be ordered chronologically, and the comments can be voted on, and the comments are sorted by vote score.

You may imagine running 2 threads for a competition... one which is a conversation and has all of the discussion about a theme.... and one in which people collate and post the entries.

That's it... and it works really well in theory, much better than a poll would, much better than hashtags combined with has:attachment searching. The voting will be right there, next to the photo you want to vote on.

The only downside is that it potentially is unbiased... in that if we displayed the "answers" chronologically the earliest posted answer will be shown to more people and benefits from potentially more votes... and likewise, if we display it by score (which we'll do) then potentially the highest voted answer is shown to more people and benefits from having it's lead reinforced... new answers score 0 and so would be at the end until they are voted on.

I really do think this is the best approach to the type of competition being proposed... and yes it does have additional benefits in that it helps to deliver functionality useful elsewhere, i.e. within the Mechanics forum we might finally answer questions like "What's the best way to unstick a stuck seat post?".