Mechanics of photography competition: voting etc.

Better to have this conversation in a thread dedicated to it, rather than in the main one.

Good idea.

@Velocio Would it make sense to put a 'Post answer' as a selectable option next to the 'Post reply' button and only those posts would be re-ordered by the voting system? I think separating entries/answers from standard replies would be handy and quite intuitive.

(see below, ignore font - just did it quickly)

1 Attachment

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?".

Ok, that makes much better sense!

I like the idea of showing the sum of upvotes and downvotes on answers, à la Ars Technica comments - it will show some answers as being more controversial than others which is an interesting metric in its own right.

Could we order the thread by time until the point at which a 'best' (or winning) answer is supplied, and then switch the order to votes at the point that the best answer has been selected?

I guess that the issue with that is that if selecting a 'best' answer effectively stops voting on a thread, if someone comes along with a better answer (e.g. in terms of the seat post example) 6 months later, that answer can't pick up the up votes...

Not quite sure where I'm taking that TBH, feels like I'm playing devils advocate a bit, as I'm not sure what the solution looks like.

That hasn't proven, in reality, to be an issue on any of the Q&A sites like the Stack Exchange network or Quora.

The best answers do rise to the top when the accepted answer proves too simplistic or insufficient.

We'll indicate the accepted answer, but the answers will be sorted by score... so it may be that the accepted answer is actually the third highest.

Ah, so they allow voting to continue after the time has finished, and the accepted answer is picked. That sounds ideal for a Q&A thread. (I've not played in Stack Exchange or Quora all that much, so am coming at this fairly uninformed.)

I'm trying to think of what you would want for a 'competition' thread if you were designing it from the ground up (rather than using a Q&A thread).

1. Thread opened with the 'competition' question.
   
2. Deadline for entries and voting set (as part of thread opening)
   
3. Thread opened for entries (replies)
   
4. Once time limit for entries has passed, thread auto closed to new entries, and voting opens automatically.
   
5. Once voting time limit has passed, thread auto locks and re-sorts to show entries in vote order.
   
   

But that would require a whole load more work, and is most likely overkill :)

All of your requirements can effectively be achieved by:

1. Having a discussion thread where theme is announced and people start work
   
2. On a given date start the Q&A with all entries
   
3. On a given date select the winner and close the Q&A (would prevent further voting)
   
   

That's it.

I think I've found a bug in the hashtag feature. If you edit an existing post and add the hashtag, it doesn't come up in the hashtag search. That is what I'm seeing anyway, I'd done it twice and both times it's not coming up in the search.

i'm testing out pollmaker - it has a setting to prevent multiple voting

can a few people vote, and try to vote again

voting
https://goo.gl/pnRyGZ

it's a bit limited.

you have to enter a unique code from this list here:

but unless someone owns the list and hands out a code to voters then it wont work. a public list wont prevent multiple votes

http://pollmaker.vote/KG6VGC35
http://pollmaker.vote/R2DPDQGM
http://pollmaker.vote/GGBZEYHS
http://pollmaker.vote/8EDWD6BX
http://pollmaker.vote/M6007PN4
http://pollmaker.vote/L0AL9YR6
http://pollmaker.vote/M6IR97IU
http://pollmaker.vote/0P0XUTMR
http://pollmaker.vote/646EMFAC
http://pollmaker.vote/9N84SRSV
http://pollmaker.vote/9WER9Q0T
http://pollmaker.vote/37XKMK0Y
http://pollmaker.vote/CREU4R9J
http://pollmaker.vote/XXUCPDKO
http://pollmaker.vote/KOUO8RPP
http://pollmaker.vote/V77U2JZI
http://pollmaker.vote/NN86T4UL
http://pollmaker.vote/V9TMYV7H
http://pollmaker.vote/C56IM6WN
http://pollmaker.vote/CR822JGG
http://pollmaker.vote/EUYWOYM7
http://pollmaker.vote/D6QJXR62
http://pollmaker.vote/7HHJXAT1
http://pollmaker.vote/33PAESW9
http://pollmaker.vote/QZAEJJVD
http://pollmaker.vote/A0RU676B
http://pollmaker.vote/3DUOU0EF
http://pollmaker.vote/7DGMGBS3
http://pollmaker.vote/CF

@Velocio, is there any way to make the sub-forum visible only to registered members?

Yes.

Trivial to do. But this will make the entire sub forum and everything within it private. Is this what you want, or would you like a new forum for the competition and to just have that be non-public.

i guess just a new comp forum would be best.
that would prevent people seeing the entries, but since the voting is a 3rd party site it wouldn't prevent @WillMelling voting for @moocher multiple times. for example.

I'll go with whatever people want. I expect most, if not all, of the people who use or view the sub-forum are members anyway.

First, thanks @moocher for updating the LFGSS Weekly Competition Gallery.

A few months ago, I think it was - or, at least, some point in the past year - the thread for the LFGSS weekly photography challenge changed from being publicly visible to not visible to the public. Personally, I think this is a great shame as lots of people post great photographs and I always enjoyed sharing them with friends/family (and sometimes they even helped me choose who I was going to vote for!). I don't fully understand why this change was made, but I think it applies to the whole subforum as @Velocio indicated it would above, so perhaps it's nothing to do with the photography comp but some other thread...

Anyway, the major point of this post is to raise whether the photo comp gallery (linked to above) could be made public? There are some really stunning photos included, posted by quite a number of active forum members, and it feels like a great pity to not be able to share more widely.

that question is actually: do all of the photographers in the thread wish for all of their photos to be creative-commons licensed and scraped by all of the AI companies, and then used to generate new content with no credit given back to you?

because that was why the defaults changed for the whole forum... the scraping by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Facebook... all significantly increased, with real bandwidth costs, as the race to train AI demands constantly fresh content

OK, sorry, I missed that (or maybe I saw it in passing, but the past 6 months have been quite crazy for me so I possibly forgot/overlooked it). However, isn't that a bit drastic? What about just updating robots.txt as suggested recently by the EFF to block the AI engines? Or even to disallow all?? And then perhaps certain 'useful' robots/crawlers could be allowed?

Sorry if these are naive questions, and I do understand the cost implications etc, particularly with the race to train, and fully support your efforts to deal with it - as well as total support for your maintenance of the entire forum :)

There are a lot of scrapers and such here, and very few respect robots.txt (Bing doesn't respect the speed part, so hammered us and cost more bandwidth).

If I try more aggressive things like blocking non-browsers, then I block people too as the tools are blunt... and I don't want to block people.

I did survey and ask at the time... and perhaps there's less scraping now, perhaps that was an early 2023 thing? I no longer have the visibility given that they're blocked