I have written up a rather long post that will be broken into two or three parts. The first part is below. The other part(s) will be posted at a later date. This is open discussion pertaining to the Haiku Contest and Poetry Contest. The Art Skills Competition may also weigh in where relevant.
Let's get the innocuous out off the way. The following are hopefully uncontroversial proposed changes that should be easy to implement.
[HAIKU][POETRY] Retire the kilopost threads. Start a new thread each year with up-to-date rules and keep the content fresher. This means the threads will be done at the end of this year and a new thread will take its place. This deals with the problem of outdated rules and permanent rule changes in the middle of the thread. [HAIKU] Create a new account to store winning entries to the Haiku Competition. [POETRY] Reopen _Poetry_ or create new account to store winning entries of the Poetry Competition. I'm leaning toward opening a new account, because _Poetry_ is affected by the underscore glitch.
So is this actually up for discussion or is it more of, hey I am going to do this and tell you guys about it?
I like the idea of having a new thread every year with the up to date rules and stuff. I don't really understand the logic behind the accounts for storing the winners.
@murasaki9 Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes! Turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes! and this is open discussion on said changes. @xXxDAPRO89xXx How about one with open comments where the writers of the winner entry can post their own winning entry, if that can be arranged.
Isn't the problem with open comments that some one will constantly have to be monitoring them to ensure that they aren't bogged down by spam? I do agree that using the comments section would be far more efficient, I just don't know how well it could be accomplished.
I advocate the opening of a dedicated poetry contest account, but not the retirement of the traditional thread. The rules since the current thread's establishment (which was itself a new thread after two contest cycles) have not changed since they were passed down from Ubertuna:
It must fit the week's theme. It must be submitted by the deadline. It cannot have inappropriate language in it. It cannot be stolen (if you plagiarize, we will find you).
Also:
The poem must be created for this contest A user cannot win two weeks in a row (though everyone is welcome to submit every week!) Only one submission per user will be accepted
As we all know, the winner will recieve a merit, and their poem will be featured on the _Poetry_ page.
Of these rules, nothing has changed, except the death of the __Poetry__ account and the current refusal to award merits (which I hope will be remedied soon). There is no evidence of "outdated rules and permanent rule changes in the middle of the thread" here.
At least, if a new thread is created, it must not only contain the rules but also links to all previous poetry contest threads.
How about one with open comments where the writers of the winner entry can post their own winning entry, if that can be arranged.
I could open the comments for that, but then there's some problems.
1. No edit feature. If they post it wrong (typo, format, etc) either it stays or they repost it.
2. Lack of participation. People might be busy, without power, or dead and not be able to post, even if they really want to. I'd rather have a full list than one where just a few enter.
3. Spam. If this thing takes off, I don't want it cluttered with false-entries and 'hi'.
Keeping it in the About covers all of these.
Is it possible several users would be allowed access the account to delete irrelevant comments?
acmed, dudeguy45, and I had equal access to the HCW account as a contingency plan, so that's possible.
In the contests themselves or people posting on the profiles? If the latter; I think if someone won a contest/round they would be able to post their winning entry on the page the first few days after the contest.
Spam.
It's almost a given that it would happen at some point or another, hence why many users having the ability to delete comments off it might solve that.
Keeping it in the About covers all of these.
If I was to click on the HCW account and there was 20 haiku's in the about, I probably wouldn't read them whereas if they were posted as comments individually I would read them. Maybe that's just me.
But a user has always had to notify a mod about needing to recieve a merit, and so ussualy that comment gets the merit. Thats how it worked in the past, at least.
