Policy Contest Rules (UPDATED 28/09/2021)

[Kyng]

Welcome to the Contests forum! Here you can participate in contests started by other members, and host your own if you want to. Just make sure you abide by these rules:

Setting up your contest

1) You must start a new topic for your contest. This must include the closing date, prizes and any of your own rules (e.g. how many entries each person may submit).

2) You may give away Coffee Credits as prizes to winners or participants in your contest. Additionally, you may give away Official Awards for exceptional achievements in your contests, above and beyond what is normally required to win. You are free to define what constitutes an 'exceptional achievement' within your own contest; however, staff may ask you to change it if they feel it is either too easy or too hard to achieve. Any prize other than Coffee Credits or Official Awards may not be given away without prior permission from an Owner or Administrator. 

The seven Official Awards that relate to contests are coloured ribbons, as follows:

blue for word games (like 20Q, Rebus, No Vowels/Numbers/Gaps and Hangman);
 orange for Mad Libs and its derivatives;
pink for creative contests (like art and writing contests);
red for prediction contests;
white for image guessing contests (such as "Guess the Cropped Image") and their derivatives;
yellow for caption contests and their derivatives;
green for any other contests not covered by this (such as "Think of a name" contests).

3) All Coffee Credit prizes for your contests must come from your own account, unless someone else agrees with you to award their own (if you win any as a host, then they will come from the Coffee Credit Bank account instead).  

4) Official Awards may not be given away for the following: 
 

• Completely random contests which involve no element of skill (e.g. "Guess what number my dice roll will land on"). Official awards are, however, permitted for educated guessing (e.g. guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar, since this requires some level of observational skill).  
  
  
• Any trivia/puzzle contest where the answers can be looked up on the internet (e.g. with a reverse image search engine or an anagram-solving tool). This still applies if the host includes a "No looking up the answers" clause in their contest rules, because there is no way to enforce such a rule or prove that it has been violated.
  

Deciding a winner (polls/judges)

5) Judges' decisions are final, and hosts should request for the topic to be closed afterwards in order to avoid arguments about the result. However, contest judges are expected to explain why they chose a particular entry as the winner, and this explanation should be based primarily on merit rather than personal preference.

6) Voting for yourself in polls is not allowed, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

7) When a poll is running, please don't post spoilers of results, or anything else that will influence people into voting for a specific entry. (It's fine to make general comments encouraging people to vote, or comment on the general closeness of the race without mentioning specific entries - but the moment you mention how specific entries are doing, that's a results spoiler)

8) Any contest that is not completed within two months of its start date will be declared null and void. (This only applies to single-round contests, not to 'ongoing' contests such as Hangman)

Miscellaneous

9) Any loop-holes in these rules must be reported on discovery so that they can be closed, and must not exploited under any circumstances.

Thank you in advance for reading and following these rules. For further information on running a contest, see the "Contest Reference and Recommendations" thread: the points listed in there are not to be considered as rules for all contest hosts, but are to be treated as the 'default' conventions (to be followed in all contests where the host does not specify otherwise).

Have fun!

[Kyng]

On a suggestion from @"Crooked Crow", I have added the following to the rules:

Voting for yourself in polls is not allowed, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

The final decision of whether or not to allow self-voting is still left to individual contest hosts. However, if they want to allow self-voting, then they have to say they're allowing it: the default setting will be that self-voting is not allowed (although I'll still try to remind people of this in every future poll that I've set up).

I will note that self-voting in the contests has historically been uncommon - and, indeed, I suspect that many people have simply assumed that it wasn't allowed . So, this is simply about bringing the official rules into line with that widespread assumption, and avoiding a situation where contests are decided by self-votes (rather than reacting to that situation when it inevitably takes place).

[Kyng]

Edited to add the following:

7) When a poll is running, please don't post spoilers of results, or anything else that will influence people into voting for a specific entry. (It's fine to make general comments encouraging people to vote, or comment on the general closeness of the race without mentioning specific entries - but the moment you mention how specific entries are doing, that's a results spoiler)