Screenshot Contest - thoughts?

[Spacethingy]

Ooooooookay....

Methinks it's time for another screenshot contest, what say you guys?

The last one was OK, but quite a few people complained (very justifiably :blush that the selection process seemed a little random. So here's a plan of how the selection process would work this time round, assuming you guys want it to happen:


- Submission

A thread will be set up for people to post their pics.
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I'll waive the over-complicated size/format rules - except perhaps keep your pictures below 2MB in size (for the low bandwidth users...)
​

- Play-off threads

Entries are split (randomly) into voting threads. I'll do this by assigning each entry a number, then randomly sorting the numbers using the atmospheric noise random number generator website...
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Each voting thread will each get about 5-8 entries, depending on how many entries there are in total. There should be no more disparity in group size than one or two.
​

The below example shows how the disparity can be kept to one in only one group by using group sizes of 5, with 26 entries:

- abcde
- fghij
- klmno
- pqrst
- uvwxy z


ONLY the winner of each group will go through to the final. In case of a tie, the tied entries will be placed in a separate vote (AV basically).

This should keep the final to a small enough size!

Thoughts? Ideas for a theme? I think I was a bit rude with the last one just making up a load of slightly strange rules and expecting people to get what I was doing... :flowers:

 

[MaverickSawyer]

It's about time! I was almost ready to start my own, but couldn't come up with an appropriate theme.

 

[N_Molson]

Mmh... Human activity on the Moon (past or future) ? :idea:

 

[Pipcard]

Mmh... Human activity on the Moon (past or future) ? :idea:

How about Human activity on any world other than the Earth? (will also include space stations in orbit)

 

[astrosammy]

2MB is still overkill. That would mean several minutes of loading in my case. Better a 100 KB, JPEG limit, with a link to a high quality version without size limit.

 

[Hurricane]

I was also thinking about a screenshot contest.
And a good contest calls for a good reward! :tiphat:
Or not. :3
Anyway, I think this is a bit of a cumbersome process to elect the winning entry. Why not just make one voting thread & get it over with?

About the theme, How about sunrise / sunset in orbit?
Or Earth rise! Or the Blue Marble! Or any revisit of a famous space photograph!

~Oz.

 

[asbjos]

Well, with "Earth rise" or "Blue Marble" as theme, we would certanly get a lot of equal pictures, so I don't think that would work... But I like the sunrise and -set idea.

And what with "The Future Of Spaceflight" or "Looking Back" (where you look back at the Earth in the picture). Or maybe a contest where the theme is a spesific planet that have to be involved with the picture?

 

[Spacethingy]

Thanks for the ideas guys...

As to simplifying the voting system, it's a bit hard as VB has a limit to the number of options you can have in a poll (i.e. 20, we got way more entries than that last time). Also, long lists are a bit of a pain for people to pick a favorite out of.

 

[Luke Skywalker]

Make the most accurate reproduction of this picture in orbiter.

 

[Jarod]

Something like that could help :
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/civs.html
(I didn't use their polls but this is just to show the kind of voting method.)

Condorcet method is easy, you just sort the choices from your favorite to your less liked choice, results are the most fair and it only requires one turn.

 

[Pale Blue Dot]

Make the most accurate reproduction of this picture in orbiter.

Haha.. sounds good to me! :lol:

 

[ky]

Another idea, how about a tribute to the Space Shuttle program?

 

[Izack]

How about "Resourcefulness in spaceflight" ?
Could cover anything from a well-built space station:

(OFSS III for example)

...To more humourous adventuring:

(Axertan's signature)

Just a suggestion; I think it would wrangle in some very interesting screenshots!

 

[Jarod]

How about "Resourcefulness in spaceflight" ?

Moreover, this is kind of the theme for 2012 spaceflight missions.

 

[Spacethingy]

Oooo, "resourcefulness", yes, excellent idea! Kinda follows on from "isolation" too. Yep, I think I'll go with that.

As to voting, I wonder if it might be a good idea to see how many participants we get before we make a decision? If we get a huge number, I'm thinking splitting is going to have to happen, but up to, I dunno, about 20ish the AV/vote-for-your-top-three style might work.

 

[Izack]

This time around I think submissions should be made privately to you instead of publicly in a thread. When you have a certain number of submissions you can create the voting thread, with the screenshots all visible in the first post, in no particular order. That way avoids a situation like last time, where my screenshot was the first one everyone saw, and many other gems better than mine were buried deeper in the thread. First impression means a lot to the voter, so in the interest of fairness presentation of candidates should be equal and simultaneous. :2cents:

Tournament-style voting groups aren't a terribly bad idea, but it's very possible for them to slight the results (to be black and white for a moment, you could have a group of crap pictures where the cream of the crap gets to the finals, and another group of high-quality shots where many get eliminated where they otherwise would have beaten the winners of the other group.) An all-in-one Condorcet election might sound tedious but would possibly be much fairer than the last OSC's method.

Edit: I'm not singling anyone out or making any reference at all to the previous OSC. There weren't any shots submitted I would consider crap, and the voting groups were pretty fairly distributed. Sorry if I implied otherwise; that was not my intention. :tiphat:

 

[Spacethingy]

This time around I think submissions should be made privately to you instead of publicly in a thread. When you have a certain number of submissions you can create the voting thread, with the screenshots all visible in the first post, in no particular order. ... First impression means a lot to the voter, so in the interest of fairness presentation of candidates should be equal and simultaneous. :2cents:

... An all-in-one Condorcet election might sound tedious but would possibly be much fairer than the last OSC's method.

Proverbial nail hit on the head there. :yes:

Right, so, a quick recap/new thought:

Theme: Resourcefulness
Submission: everyone emails their entry to [email protected]. Then, after 10 days, I put a thread together with all the entries displayed together.
Voting: players vote for a winner. If under 20 entries (rather unlikely) I'll do a forum poll on the forum, if not I'll do a PollDaddy thing on my website.
If there's a tie... we'll call it a tie!

Does that sound better?