Well, our contest officially ended today! (CLOSED) We have received 8 submissions, which is great!

Now it is time to VOTE for our winners!

Voting will end in TWO weeks on April 14th.

PLEASE vote for your favorite story! We'd like the voting portion to be quick and easy.

(UPDATED)

And now for our showcase! These are all of our submissions for the contest. The authors worked really hard on it, so please read them and vote.

THIS IS HOW THE CONTEST IS GOING TO RUN:
The admins shall choose a winning fic as well as the poll. This is how it will work.
The example below shows a voter and their top three choices.
Admin A: 123
Admin B: 345
POLL: 456
~~~~~~
This is the point breakdown per choice. First choice gets three points, second choice gets two and third gets three. Add them all together and this is what you get.
1 : 3 points
2 : 2 points
3 : 4 points
4 : 5 points
5 : 3 points
6 : 1 point
~~~~~~
1st place: 4, highest overall points
2nd place: 3, second highest scoring value
3rd place: 5, tied with 1 but because 1 showed up only once it lost (tie breaker was used here)

Either/Or by Cynewulf

What Once Was Lost by Night Spark

Lunar Limbo by Pump It Up

Evil Flower by Aqua Shimmer

A Thousand Years Of Hell by Somber Star

Over A Cardboard Sea by SPark

Those Final Words by Stardust Speedster

Start Of A New Day by DH7

Check them out!!! DO IT NOW!!!

YOUR LORD AND SAVIOR PRINCESS LUNA DEMANDS IT!!!

~Weeping Angel

Oh man you scared me. I'm gonna be a late submission lol

3163654
That's okay.
I don't think I'll have the time to post this tomorrow, so I just went ahead today. It officially closes at around 5:00 tomorrow, though, so please be on time! Wouldn't want your hard work to not be admired.

Late submission here. Just now finished editing it. The word-count limit was murder.
I just need to look over the rules about uploading.
Edit-Uploaded.

*anxiety for April 14th intensifies*

3163204 So... this is a popularity contest?

I thought there were judges.

3166424 I kind of thought that too. I don't really have any hope of winning if it's just based off of popularity. And I feel like I put a lot into writing a really good story that had a chance of winning otherwise.

3166429 If it's by popular vote, then Cynewulf wins by default. What's the point of entering?

3166431 Yeah. And the poll doesn't let only people who are members of this group vote... what if somebody campaigned to get all their watchers to come vote? I'm almost tempted to do that, 'cause at least I'd have more than one vote for me that way. But if I do that, and then everybody does that, and like you said, there wouldn't be a point to the contest at all.

3166435 I kinda regret entering this rigged contest already.

3166440 I don't think it was "rigged" exactly, but I do wish we'd been told up front that it would be community voting, and not a panel of judges.

The admins will not be the only ones judging

I mean, I did see, that, but I thought it meant they'd have a community choice award, as well as the official winner, not that it would just be a flat vote. I guess I should have asked.

3166444

I do wish we'd been told up front that it would be community voting, and not a panel of judges.

As you said though, it's not community voting. Anyone outside the group can vote.

Sounds rigged to me.

3166450
3166449

The admins will not be the only ones judging. We will post a poll for which one you choose, and it will be online. Vote there for which story you like the best!

I believe that means the poling system counts as a single vote, or is weighted in some other way against admins votes. I will double check though.

Heck, I'm just glad I entered the thing.

I'm not sure If I would win or not (read a few of the stories so far, my face went at how good they were) but either way I'd be fine. Just gives me a little more practice in writing. I really like to do these story prompt things, and see other people's takes on them. Good luck, everyone!

3166440
Maybe it is rigged.
Maybe you're right. But whatever it is, this is a group contest. Nothing serious at all. Maybe Cynewulf won't win. It just depends.

What do you suggest doing then? After all, this is a beta test contest. Personally, I have never hosted a contest.

3166623 I've never seen a group contest with voting that went terribly well, tbh. The people who enter vote for themselves. Most of the other group members never read all the stories and so don't vote at all. Add in open voting like this and whoever pushes more of their own followers to go and vote will win.

I'd personally really rather have a group of judges give thoughtful consideration to all the stories, so everyone has a chance to win on writing merit, rather than making "winning" be a matter of who is the biggest name out of the authors entered, or who is the most willing to subvert the intent by dragging people from outside the group in.

3166623

What do you suggest doing then?

Um...

... what every other group does. You get judges, read the entries, then judge.

Get mad at me all you want, but there's no other way to slice it.

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO VOTED ALREADY:
I'm sorry, there's been some confusion with the poll thingy.
Turns out you can't edit the poll after you create it.
(Dumb rule, huh?)
So as a result of my stupidity, please VOTE AGAIN.
I repeat, VOTE AGAIN.

Sorry about that.

3166648
3166657
How about this?
We take one overall winner (an official winner, per se) judged by the admins. Then we take a community winner from the poll and see about that.

Because dammit, I should have thought this through more. I thought it would work, silly me.

3166673

We take one overall winner (an official winner, per se) judged by the admins.

That should be it. Period. End of story. Done.

3166673 I think a judged winner and a community choice winner is a great compromise.

And I apologize if I came across as overly critical. I was just kind of taken aback, since I had gotten the impression that there would be judges like most contests I've seen around.

3166686
3166688
Talking with SirRage about it.

3166686
3166688
3166706
Alright everyone. Seeing that we have a poll and Angel said we would use a poll, were going to use a poll. And here is how we are going to do it:

The example below shows a voter and their top three choices.

Admin A: 123
Admin B: 345
POLL: 456
~~~~~~
This is the point breakdown per choice. First choice gets three points, second choice gets two and third gets three. Add them all together and this is what you get.

1 : 3 points
2 : 2 points
3 : 4 points
4 : 5 points
5 : 3 points
6 : 1 point
~~~~~~
1st place: 4, highest overall points
2nd place: 3, second highest scoring value
3rd place: 5, tied with 1 but because 1 showed up only once it lost (tie breaker was used here)

3166832 I'd like to politely withdraw my entry, please. I don't wish to take part in this anymore. You either do a contest right, or you don't. Any type of 'Community Voting' should have no bearing AT ALL on the final results of the contest. If anything, that should be something completely separate, in and of itself. Even the youngest, least experienced groups know this.

If community voting is something you HAVE to have, then save it for another category. If you'd like some examples of properly formed, properly regulated, and properly maintained contests, then just let me know.

3166859
I will pass this on to Angel. She's sleeping by now so she won't be able to modify anything till tomorrow.

I do apologize for the confusion and stress this has caused. Given the difficulty to modify the poll we might just have to exclude votes for your fic.

3166951 Thanks.

3166832
Honestly, we don't have the poll, we could just choose the fic ourselves.

If people find it better for admins to vote, then maybe we should just do that.

It doesn't really matter to me, as long as the confusion is ironed out.
How I've seen it done before, it was just the community voting. But whatever is fine with me.

3167820

I thought the poll was separate from the contest. I will go along with whatever the admins here decide. I've already written the story, and I'm not sorry that I did.

I, however, agree with those that are in favor of judges. Community voting is a nightmare. I wouldn't have thought so at first, but my time over at Fanfiction.net has taught me to not trust popularity, not even in the slightest. Popular vote might as well be a contest of who's been here the longest, or who has the largest following. If that's the case, might as well nix on all that pesky writing business and simply check the contestant's profiles.

You need people that won't vote for their favorite forum-goer, people that can look at stories objectively without letting their preferences for certain genres or ships get in the way of their decision-making. Even a panel of vastly inexperienced writers would be better than relying on the general populace.

Anyway, first contest, huh? I didn't know that this forum was that new. I would have thought that there would have been a well-established Luna forum at least since 'Luna Eclipsed' (probably my favorite episode.) I'm not really surprised to see a bit of trial and error going on here. I'm sure that all sorts of things will change five contests from now.

I think a judged winner and a community choice winner is a great compromise.

I agree. I had originally thought that the poll was separate, I even voted for one of the competitors. While I don't put any stock in community voting, I think of it as a 'fun' little feature. I don't think that a community vote should be mixed in with an admin vote, but I certainly wouldn't get rid of the poll either.

3168189 Glad I'm not the only one around here.

3168309

What an utter debacle of a contest.

To be honest, I think you might be laying the anger on a bit thick. While I agree with you, the vitriol isn't necessary, or helpful. I can understand the emotion, considering that you probably spent weeks on this, but the lack of civility is probably the easiest way to be ignored.

I'm a little disappointed that you withdrew your entry. We've already written our stories. It costs us nothing to continue to participate.

3168427

but the lack of civility is probably the easiest way to be ignored.

There's been a lot of ignoring going on around here.

It might've been harsh, but it's my own beliefs, so whatever. I'm not even in the contest anymore. It doesn't matter anyway.

If a whopping 1/3 of your score is by anyone who has a computer, you have a broken system that needs serious remedy.

3168453

If a whopping 1/3 of your score is by the community, you have a broken system that needs serious remedy.

You did see the word example in my post right? Because there are five admins, adding a poll to the mix would put the total count to six. So one sixth of the votes. And even with a 1/3 voting swing as shown in the example, Admin A was unable to do more than influence second place using it's third place pick. Admin A could have easily been poll, it doesn't matter. The example clearly illustrates that if your the only one voting for something it won't win, so there is no way the poll could ever control the vote.

Judges:
The admins will not be the only ones judging. We will post a poll for which one you choose, and it will be online. Vote there for which story you like the best!

This was taken from the original thread that is now 4 weeks old. Any concerns regarding this clause should have been raised sooner. At the very least it could have been raised before the scheduled end date for any clarification.

3168453
3168427

It's unfortunate that there have been some misunderstands here. But I can assure everyone that it will be fare, and above all this was suppose to be fun.

It's also fun for the people voting and letting the community have some say in it, so please keep them in mind as well.

3168614 You're missing the point.

Even if voting is 1/100 of your final score, it's still unfair, regardless.

I wish I had known all of this before writing my story, so that I could've been helping my friends instead and not wasting my time.

3168614

It's unfortunate that there have been some misunderstands here. But I can assure everyone that it will be fare, and above all this was suppose to be fun.
It's also fun for the people voting and letting the community have some say in it, so please keep them in mind as well.

I hope that it still is. I would not have voiced my own concerns if there wasn't already a discussion on the matter. I'm opinionated, but I should read contest threads a bit more carefully.

I want to make it clear, by expressing my opinion of such polls, I'm doing just that, and nothing more.

Would it lighten the mood if I were to flood the thread with Pinkie emoticons?

3168697
Sure,
I'm happy that I clarified things.

3168646
I am sorry you feel that way, even though you did make a story people have enjoyed. If you really feel this strongly about things you could always unpublished or delete your story.

3168895 Delete a story? Never.

I keep them so that I can learn from my mistakes.

3168614

This was taken from the original thread that is now 4 weeks old. Any concerns regarding this clause should have been raised sooner. At the very least it could have been raised before the scheduled end date for any clarification.

I think the actual problem is here in this post, right in the title: "VOTE for Our Winners", implying that this vote is the one and only way the winner will be chosen, where I think several of us were under the impression that the admins would chose a winner and there would be some kind of community voting.

I was fine with the bit you quoted as I understood it at the time.

(I mean... I'm still okay with it however it comes out, it's your group, but I don't feel like web polls are ideal. I am still honestly kind of tempted to ask my viewers to come and vote, since I still just have one sad, lonely vote up there. I notice that the one fic that is currently winning by a HUGE margin is, in fact the one fic whose author has asked their watchers to go and vote.)

3170174
In the future we'll come up with a better solution, and I will ask Angel to update the title of the post.

To be honest I don't see a problem asking your followers to go check out this contest and vote for the one they like most. I think it's a little petty to just ask people to vote for you just because, but even if that happens that will not govern the total outcome of the contest.

I know it's not a perfect, full proof system but it should still be fair in the end.

3170281 I'm not sure how that's fair? When somebody with 300+ followers and somebody with less than 20 both ask their followers to go vote, it means you could, as DH7 said, just save everyone the trouble and check the profiles of the authors to get the outcome. Yet I'm pretty sure that "number of followers" isn't really the best judge of who's written the best story.

3170289
Your right. And we didn't want it to be a simple who has more follows will win competition. Community participation sounded like a good idea, so we proposed a system that balanced it. Here are the exact numbers that a voter (admin or poll) has:

Influence:
8.3% for First Choice (3/36)
5.5% for Second Choice (2/36)
2.7% for Third (1/36)

It wouldn't be an automatic win even if the three results of the poll were skewed and only a popularity contest. It would nudge the final results, but it would still require the other five judges voting for them to matter. Otherwise it would just be noise.

This is why two second place votes, or even a second and third place vote are better than a single first place vote.

I hope that helps.

3170396 Oh, I wasn't saying your whole idea was terrible, I understand that the voting doesn't really weigh that much towards the final result. And I'm not upset or anything. Just pointing out that from my point of view the voting itself can't possibly be fair.

3170399
Ah, okay. I wasn't sure.

I hope people play nice, but I guess we'll just have to see.

I know it's not a perfect, full proof system but it should still be fair in the end.

Um... no. Not at all.

3171015
You do realize this is less rigged than a Presidential election, right? The system nerfs railroading, so no one person can just take it over. Sure you can still try to railroad a fic into the spotlight but the way things have been set up, it's actually more damaging than good.

It's not first past the post either, which is a terrible system. I have no quorum keeping this debate open because I've done the math and I know it's fair.

3171296

You do realize this is less rigged than a Presidential election, right?

In what way? Citizens of the U.S. vote for president, then the electoral college does so after that.

Assuming that members of this group would be the "citizens", there are actually people outside of the "country" that can vote on this issue. Like if a candidate had a shit-ton of family that voted only for them, even if they weren't from that "country."

So...

I've done the math and I know it's fair.

It doesn't take Einstein to figure out that's not true.

3171311

In what way?

I'm not using first past the post, which means each voting entity will give me their first, second and third choices. The election system we have today, each voter only submits one vote. This actually makes quote a bit of difference if you do the math.

In addition to that, I feel gypped as a citizen that I can cast a vote and that vote is only recognized though proxy.

The poll improvises this, because each person can only cast one vote. So I pull the top three from the poll.

As for people voting outside of this group, a very large percentage of the people on this forum are already members of this group. And having contestants asking their families and Facebook friends to help isn't going to help.

It doesn't take Einstein to figure out that's not true.

By all means, Show me how someone with a million poll votes will win.

3171366

By all means, Show me how someone with a million poll votes will win.

No matter how small an advantage is, it's STILL an advantage.