Reference Contests Reference and Recommendations

[Kyng]

Welcome to the Contest Reference and Recommendations Thread! 

This thread is intended as a companion to the Contest Rules. It contains various pieces of advice intended to help you to start and run your own contests. They're not to be taken as rules - you're 100% free to disregard these suggestions in their entirety - but, we hope you find them useful . 

Of course, there are several questions to consider when setting up a contest - starting with: 

What rules should I set?

Well, obviously, you need an explanation of how your contest works . The Contest Forum Rules also require that you specify the closing date, along with any prizes. If you want to know what makes a good closing date, or what makes a good prize - well, those are both covered further down .

Beyond these basic rules, it's probably not a good idea to add much more: especially if you're running a new type of contest for the first time, it's a good idea to keep things simple and easy to follow. However, after a contest has been run several times, it's likely that unanticipated situations will have arisen, which will require new rules to be introduced to handle them in the future. One example of this would be the size limits in most Minecraft building contests. Early Minecraft contests had no size limits at all, and experience showed that these quickly devolved into an arms race, with one or two people building bigger and bigger structures, which took more and more hours to construct, which left everyone else totally unable to compete because they didn't have enough free time to build their own mega-structures.  

There are other common situations which crop up in 'ongoing' contests: who gets to host the next round after the current one has been completed? What happens if the round stalls, either because everyone gets stuck or because the host stops replying? The standard rules for these situations are as follows:  

 

• The winner of the previous round is allowed to host the next round, as long as they do so within three days. If they decline to host the subsequent round, or they fail to do so within three days, then anybody is free to host. 
  
  
• If the round stalls (because everyone gets stuck and nobody plays for three days running), then the host wins the round and receives the corresponding Coffee Credits + right to host the next round. However, if the same host wins three rounds in a row, then they may not host the following round (so, anybody can host). 
  
  
• If the round stalls (because the host fails to respond to people's posts three days after they are made), then the round is declared null and void, and anyone may start a new round.
  

 

You're not required to use these rules; however, I've decided to leave them in this thread for your convenience. This way, as part of your opening post, you can simply link to this thread saying that "The Standard Rules for Hosting Rounds apply here" - without having to spell them out every single time . 

How much time should I allow?

Generally, the closing date should provide enough time for everyone to see the contest (so, no less than a week), but long enough to make sure people don't just put their entry off until later and then end up forgetting about it (so, no more than two weeks). If your contest requires more time and effort (for example, Minecraft building contests), then it might be worth having a deadline longer than two weeks; however, for simpler things like caption contests, one week is more than enough. 

Out of necessity, one exception to this guideline is my series of tennis contests: these have very short closing dates of two or three days (because the draws are only published two or three days before the beginning of the tournament). However, barring any necessity such as this, it's best to stay in the one-to-two-week range. 

How should I decide who wins?

Back in the early days of the forum, the host usually judged which entry they thought the best (or, if the host wanted to enter their own contest, then they got someone else to judge). This isn't so common any more - although, it is still an option if you'd like to use it. However, as stated in the rules, contest judges are expected to explain why they chose a particular entry as the winner, and this explanation should be based primarily on objective merit. After all, we want to avoid a situation where Member A spends five hours putting together a well-made piece of art, and Member B throws together something in MS Paint in five minutes, and then the judge says "Member B wins because their entry is blue, and blue is my favourite colour" - because then, Member A is going to feel very cheated.

Judging isn't the only option, of course. Recently, it's been more common for contests to be decided by polls, which will usually run for three to five days after the deadline for entering the contest passes. One thing you may have noticed about these polls is that some of them are "Vote for your favourite entry", while some allow you to choose two or three. There aren't any fixed rules as to how many choices each person is allowed to vote for, and individual contest hosts are allowed to use whatever system they wish. However, for my own contest polls, I use the following system: 

1. Start with the total number of entries in the poll (e.g. 5); 
2. Square-root this number (in this case, 2.236....);
3. Round this down to the nearest whole number (e.g. 2). 

This gives us the following conversion, for anyone who doesn't want to work through the calculation: 

How many choices should I offer in my poll?
Number of entries in poll	Maximum number of choices each user can select
1-3	1
4-8	2
9-15	3
16-24	4
25 [Max]	5

Of course, this is only what I do. Doesn't mean you need to do this - but, if you think it's a good idea, then you can .  

What should the prize be?

Typically, 'contest prizes' on TCH mean two things: Coffee Credits as a basic prize, and Ribbons for achieving a more advanced goal beyond simply winning the contest. Of course, this raises two further questions: how many Coffee Credits should be awarded, and what should people have to do in order to win a Ribbon? 

Typically, the contests that take more effort to enter (such as the Minecraft building contests) should command higher Coffee Credit prizes than the simpler stuff (like word games). For example, the Minecraft contests have a fixed top prize of 2500CC, whereas the caption contests have a fixed top prize of 500CC. Hangman has a variable prize depending on how quickly people get it, but it usually works out somewhere in the 200s. 

Also, I will note here that I'm talking about the "average prize", rather than the "maximum prize". To take an extreme example, the tennis tournament contests have a theoretical maximum prize of 4000CC (if eight wildcards or qualifiers make it to the quarter-finals, and somebody predicts all eight correctly) - but, in practice, that's about as likely to happen as Donald Trump illegally emigrating to Mexico tomorrow . In reality, it's rare for people to win more than 300CC from a tennis tournament contest. 

Ribbons, obviously, will vary heavily depending on the contest. However, here are some examples of typical ribbon criteria, for each specific category of contest: 

Types of Ribbons
Ribbon Type	Criteria	Examples	Suggested Ribbon Criteria
Blue Ribbon	Word Games	Hangman Crack the Code	Solve within a specific number of turns (e.g. for a 20-turn game, solve within 10 turns)
Orange Ribbon	Mad Libs and derivatives	Mad Libs Contest #10 12 Days of Christmas	Win a poll by at least 2 votes (Only awarded if at least 3 people enter)
Pink Ribbon	Creative Contests	Minecraft Art Cube Contest Create Your Own Tournament Contest	Win a poll by at least 2 votes (Only awarded if at least 3 people enter)
Red Ribbon	Educated guessing or prediction	2017 Wimbledon Prediction Contest When will we hit 250,000 posts?	Predict to a high degree of accuracy (e.g. for a sports tournament,  predict all semi-finalists correctly)
White Ribbon	Picture Games	Guess the Cropped Image	Solve within a specific number of turns (e.g. for a 20-turn game, solve within 10 turns)
Yellow Ribbon	Caption Contests and derivatives	March 2017 Caption Contest	Win a poll by at least 2 votes (Only awarded if at least 3 people enter)
Green Ribbon	Other (anything that doesn't fit into the criteria listed above)	CJ's Connecting Wall 60 Gold Statues	Varies depending on the contest!

General tips and recommendations

I'll finish off with a few short words of advice which didn't really fit neatly into the above guide, but which I still believe are worth sharing. Of course, you're free to take them or leave them; however, my experience is that following this advice will help you to avoid some of the pitfalls that commonly cause contests to fail: 
 

• Keep the rules simple and easy to follow. Each rule that you include in your contest should serve a clear and specific purpose, and be necessary for the contest to run smoothly. Adding more rules for the sake of having them rarely ends well: I've seen many an idea which sounded cool in theory, but then in practice, it toppled under the weight of its own complexity .   
  
  
• Avoid contests which boil down to who can invest the most time. As stated above, the size limits in Minecraft contests were introduced in order to ensure that the contests rewarded the most skilled builders - and not just whoever happened to have the most free time on their hands. Without a limit like this, it not only became unfair on people who didn't have much free time, but entering stopped being fun for the few people who did, because the building process turned into a long slog that could last for many hours. We recommend that, even for the higher-end creative contests, a quality entry with a good chance of winning should take no longer than 2-3 hours to create. 
  
  
• Try to avoid overdoing your contests. If you've already done three caption contests recently, it's probably not a good idea to do another one so soon, even if the previous ones were successful. It's very easy to have too much of a good thing - and, experience shows that no matter how good a contest is, people will grow bored of it if it's run constantly.
  

 

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That's all for now - but, if I missed anything (which I probably have ), then I'll add it here later on. If you have any recommendations of your own, then go ahead and chip in. Or, if you have any further questions, ask away. 

Now, all that remains for me to say is - have fun with your contests !