Malarame
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Well, the first portion of the contest is now over - I'm not accepting any new entries. It's now time to find out which story was the best. Please read all of the stories before you vote so you know which ones are the best and deserve to win. Feel free to discuss the entries here, just don't tell anyone which entry is yours.

In the event of a tie for any place, the winner will be the person with the most "10" votes. If there is a tie for "10" votes, it will go to "9", and so on until there is a winner.

On a more personnal note, I'd like to thank everyone who submitted a story. We got far more entries than I ever expected to get, and the quality was superb to say the least. The people voting have a hard choice ahead of them, and I have a feeling the winner is going to be decided by a very small margin.

____________________________
Matt O'Leary
Webb Institute
Class of 2007

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."
-Groucho Marx

Malarame
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Alright, I've tried to make this poll 3 times already and for some reason the order keeps getting messed up. There's no way to edit the order of the questions, so just make sure you read which entry is associated with each poll option so you don't vote for the wrong story.

____________________________
Matt O'Leary
Webb Institute
Class of 2007

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."
-Groucho Marx

Schik
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I don't see a #2 or #5 in there...

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eytanz
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Are entries 2 and 5 off the poll because their authors also submitted another entry, or is it a mistake?

Bah. I see Schik already asked the question while I was posting.

[Edited by eytanz at Local Time:05-20-2005 at 06:02 PM]

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Malarame
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eytanz wrote:
Are entries 2 and 5 off the poll because their authors also submitted another entry, or is it a mistake?]

That's exactly right, the authors submitted multiple entries and chose not to include entries #2 or #5 in the poll.

____________________________
Matt O'Leary
Webb Institute
Class of 2007

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."
-Groucho Marx

trick
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Any voting rules for story authors ? Should authors give their own story a 10, or attempt to give it a more realistic rating ?

- Gerry

zex20913
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Hopefully there will be enough authors voting themselves high that everything else will cancel out.

My concern is that authors will vote down other stories, as there seem to be a lot of undeserved 1s as is.

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silver
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in an ideal world, the authors wouldn't get a vote.

if we assume there is at least one author who is voting for maximum chance of winning (as opposed to honestly assessing the stories), then all the authors should vote that way, making it a huge tie broken only by everyone else's ratings. exactly as if the authors didn't get a vote


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goldenlion
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Well, the system in the past has been authors give themselves 10's and then vote for the rest as they please.

Personally, I think that the best authors (i.e. those with the best chance to win) will respect the good writing of others enough to give them a fair shake in what essentially is an honor system. I don't think it would be to terribly hard to bar the authors from voting if that was necessary -- however, the authors do have a chance to vote, therefore they should give their own story a 10 and give a fair rating to everyone else.

Besides, if you need to resort to voting 1's on everyone else's story to win, you're missing the point.

[Edited by goldenlion at Local Time:05-20-2005 at 07:54 PM: expanding a point]

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silver
Level: Smitemaster
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File: contest_entries.zip (62.5 KB)
Downloaded 101 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

This is a zip file of all the entries. Other than renaming them to put their entry number in the title, I have not modified the files in any way (I haven't even opened them to read yet)


[Edited by silver at Local Time:05-20-2005 at 11:06 PM: grammar]

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Malarame
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Good job Silver. Thanks for doing that - I didn't think of it.

As for authors voting? I guess I should have said something about it when I made this poll. In an ideal world, all the authors would rate their own story not as a 10 but as whatever they think it deserves. Additionally, in an ideal world, the authors would refrain from giving everyone else a 1 and rate them as they deserve. Obviously, we're not living in an ideal world, so if authors want to give themselves a 10, go for it. Just please don't give everyone else a 1. Please rate all the stories honestly.

____________________________
Matt O'Leary
Webb Institute
Class of 2007

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."
-Groucho Marx

ErikH2000
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Malarame wrote:
Please rate all the stories honestly.

Yes, please do. It is a little depressing when all the story averages are low because some people are unfairly handing out "1" ratings. Let's be honorable here!

-Erik

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AlefBet
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Actually, I think authors should as a rule give themselves a 10. Creators are often one of the poorer judges of the success of their own work and it's pretty common for the quality of a work to be inversely correlated with the author's own evaluation of it. We can sidestep all that by just having authors all give themselves a 10.

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eytanz
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Maybe just stipulate that authors can't vote?

I guess it's a bit late for this contest (since there may be people who would prefer voting to participating), but it's generally the case that some people give their competitors 1 (in the roach contest, for instance, there were some cases where it was clear when an author voted because everyone's score but his would gain another 1 and his score would get a 10).

The honor system is great, but it ends up rewarding the people who don't obey it.

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AlefBet
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eytanz wrote:
The honor system is great, but it ends up rewarding the people who don't obey it.

Well, my point was that even when people follow the honor system, it's better if authors automatically give themselves a 10, since the author's own honest appraisal of his/her work is often a poor indicator of its quality. Sometimes extremely so.

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++Adam H. Peterson

eytanz
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Yeah, I agree. But undervaluing oneself is a smaller problem than people giving their opponents 1s, because it's unlikely that people will give themselves 1 - so someone who scores himself too low is likely to lose less by that then the opponents of someone scoring unfairly will.

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Malarame
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I think eytanz has the best idea, not allowing the authors to vote. However, there's no way to enforce this, and all it would take is one or two authors giving everyone else a 1 and themselves a 10 while the others not vote at all to affect the results.

In the future, whoever is running a contest should definitely make rules for how the contest participants should vote. I regret not doing it when I made the poll. Unfortunately, I didn't think of it then.

____________________________
Matt O'Leary
Webb Institute
Class of 2007

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."
-Groucho Marx

eytanz
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I think Schik can generate a list of the people who voted.

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Malarame
Level: Master Delver
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eytanz wrote:
I think Schik can generate a list of the people who voted.

Really? If he can do that, then maybe I should lock this poll and create a new one with the stipulation that authors can't vote. Anyone who's already voted (and isn't an author) would have to vote again. Of course, there would be the problem of 17 people not being allowed to vote. I don't know how many will actually vote in the end... that 17 may be a significant portion of the people who actually vote.

____________________________
Matt O'Leary
Webb Institute
Class of 2007

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception."
-Groucho Marx

Banjooie
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Well, in the interest of fairness, I'm just not going to vote for any of 'em, then.

And that...that's a /lot/ of 1's. o_o

[Edited by Banjooie at Local Time:05-21-2005 at 07:28 AM]

techant
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I have noticed that there are some short stories that have received 1's that I am sure, do not deserve them. Those stories had good content, were on topic and had no major spelling or grammar problem that would reduce them to a level of 1. They were stories I gave very high scores to. I can only think that there is some other reason they received a 1. Maybe everyone who voted needs to explain there ratings just like a teacher does.

If the moderator can view poll results by the individual voter, as eytanz suggested, I think those that look suspicious should be thrown out. If it is a writer they should be contacted and ask to explain themselves. If the explanation is lame then they should be publicly warned that behavior like that will get them kicked out of participation in future contests. I said publicly because different contest may be run by different individuals, and they would need a way to know who to keep an eye on.

The reason I am being so hard is not that I got low votes and have hurt feeling. It is that I do not want to see good writers discourage by receiving those 1's. There were some very good stories in this contest I am sad they are not getting the recognition that they deserve.

Hopefully it is not other writers desperate to win. It is also my hope that those that voted so harshly are not aware of how this affects those that took the time to write good stories.

As for me I only found one essay that rated a 1 vote and it was removed, from voting. If this pattern continues I suggest the voting be frozen and new rules be established for voting. While I do not support removing those who wrote essays from voting, because other writers can be our best critics, I do think maybe they must state why they voted the way they did for their votes to count.

I do worry that it has come to this point. Is winning so important or is it the prize pile that is so tempting, what do you think? Maybe it is just that some do not value a good contest and are spoiling it for the rest of us?

I will be back later to see what others have to say.

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wackhead_uk
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There's always someone who gives everyone a 1 in the polls, speaking from experience. I assume it's someone who has been here for a long time, as it's happened in most contests over the past X months.

trick
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Well.. I voted before I got many replies to my question, and ended up giving my own story a 10. I feel kinda bad about it now, though.

Oh well, at least I rated the other stories fairly. Another 10, many 9s. One or two 4s, but nothing lower than that.

Seeing all those 1s make me sad.

- Gerry

Mattcrampy
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Such is the risks of having open voting, I guess. Perhaps, if we can't get a programmatic solution, we can try closed voting, where people nominate their top picks and PM them to the contest runner.

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MeckMeck GRE
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Mhhh... now I feel a little sorry about my vote. I just set my own to 10 and pressed vote. As I realized this will now really give all others a 1 i hit back and gave the others rates between 3 and 7. As I pressed vote again I got "You have already voted"

gamer_extreme_101
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MeckMeck GRE wrote:
Mhhh... now I feel a little sorry about my vote. I just set my own to 10 and pressed vote. As I realized this will now really give all others a 1 i hit back and gave the others rates between 3 and 7. As I pressed vote again I got "You have already voted"

Well, I'm sure that if you gave Schik a bag of M&Ms, he could clear your vote and allow you to vote again. After all, he is t3h leet forum god.

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Banjooie
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Hey, regarding the flow of 1's:

What's the /default/ vote again? Because I get the feeling some folk only voted for a few, and if the default is 1, well.

rowrow
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Yes, the default is 1. It happened to me a couple times I forgot to vote on some things...
Maybe the default should be 10, so if you do that accidently, everyone will get a 10 instead of a 1.

[Edited by rowrow at Local Time:05-24-2005 at 05:42 AM]

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Oneiromancer
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No, you don't want to skew things in the opposite direction. In my opinion, the ideal default value should be 5, especially when dealing with contests.

Game on,

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eytanz
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Eep. I just pressed view results by accident. Dang.

As for the default value - if it's 5 it still skews things down. The scale should either be changed to 1-9 if there is to be a middle value.

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