Photo Of The Month (POTM) Contests!!

I take offense to this. What you are saying here is that a bunch of us on the board have no integrity and we don't have the ability to judge whose pics are best based solely on the pic and not who submitted it.

 

So club members shouldn't be able to win when the contests are voted on by members? They are after all associated with the same club. There could be some conspiring to sway the vote.

 

we do have plans to do something like that @gburkart, things like all members vote, a "photo panel" that casts votes, etc. this was just the first run and for no specific reason we decided to make it BoD vote. There was one good reason why this turned out to be a good decision after the fact and that was because of a couple complexities with the way the addon operates.

 

You can have voting issues with any method. The same panel every time could also be bias towards certain things. Members could team together and sway the vote. The BOD could conspire so armydog never wins. So many options for problems.
As mentioned there will be different ways the winners are chosen to try and keep things as fair as possible. Its going to be a work in progress until things get ironed out.

Its just as plausible as your accusations that the BOD conspired to award the win to a BOD member.
And judging by the number of likes that go along with each picture I would say a member vote would have had the same results we are seeing now.

 

With the software everything is HOPEFULLY going to be done automatically.
It starts the contest on a certain date, ends the contest on a certain date and opens it for voting to the "voting group" for a certain time frame. The voting group can choose their top 3. Then it automatically announces the winner and gives them a ribbon. At least that's supposed to be how it works once everything is figured out.

The idea being that if its all done automatically there is no excuse to it not happening. It might take a few months and some trial and error to get it working well, but it's a start

 

Additionally, the # of votes per user is a setting, so we might do one contest where the members get to vote on only one pic, then another where they could vote for 5. I guess it depends on how much participation there is = how many votes we might set it to allow.

The Voting Group is a system permission, so we could create a "Photo Judging Panel" usergroup and give that group voting permission for a particular contest, and for another contest we give the GIRS Member group permission, etc.

If we wanted to, we could use the "likes" to "filter" down the list of top candidates and then have the panel vote for their favorite out of those select few. Something like that would have to be kind of "manual" meaning, there is no automatic way to restrict which pictures can be voted for. But, I'm willing to bet that type of feature could be developed (for $$ but probably like $10-15)

The problem with using "likes" to do anything is that you can't "lock it down" at a certain point - that's not how the Media Gallery works. So after the contest is over, people can keep "liking" pics, which is fine as long as everyone understands that at the "snapshot" point where the contest ends, that's where the tally is officially taken.

If anyone wants to see how this addon is configured "behind the scenes" you can see it here: Media Of The Month | Xen Factory