Off Topic Playground

[SteamHammer]

While I like the not-working and seeing people part I hate the travelling and waiting in random airports and other transit places.

[edonil]

Ah yes...that I do understand. The locations are nice, the getting there, not so much. Morning Reg, how goes?

[SteamHammer]

Worked out the voting rules for the competition yet? Or is it down to some Wyrd judges? Or both?

[edonil]

I'm not really sure. I'm honestly leaning towards both- a voting system and some impartial judges. Or something. Now that I think about it, that sounds way too much like the Idol setup. I think impartial judging would be the easiest, and allow for a scoring system of some kind, but it's just a matter of finding judges. I know of one friend who volunteered as soon as I mentioned it, so it might be easier than I'm thinking.

[SteamHammer]

Depends on how much time you want to spend tallying up the scores. A poll where everyone gets one vote is easy to do as the forum will have one. Or you could go more complex and add things up by hand.

[edonil]

Hm. Perhaps doing an impartial judging with a score, and a vote? And the winner of each round is the one with the highest of both?

[SteamHammer]

How about even more complex almost Eurovision style. Each author can award one story 10 votes, one 8, 6, 4, 2, 1 (or other combos) but can't award it to their own story. The judges get the same or even more points to share around. The readers just get a single vote.

[edonil]

...Hm. So, the reader polls would be anonymous, while each author or judge would submit their votes to an organizer, and totals are done there? I like that, actually. Keeps things nice and simple. The only thing that I think it might be bad with is for feedback purposes, but I suppose those things shouldn't be ranked anyway.

[SteamHammer]

Maybe have each author and judge explain their reasoning behind the points. Did they like the writing style, characters, use of secret ingredient etc.

[edonil]

How much of that would end up on the forums though? I guess that's part of what I'm trying to figure out, is how much do we publish/not publish, and part of it, honestly, is that this is supposed to be an exercise in fun. Last thing I want to do is kill someone's ambition for writing because they got a low score on things...but at the same time, there's also the fact that other people need the feedback to improve, and are looking for scores they can directly correlate to how they did.