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Contest rules (Updated 10/03/18); Please read before starting a contest!
Topic Started: Feb 26 2011, 02:12 PM (3,054 Views)
CJ
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A very minor case of serious brain damage

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-ribbon: blue for word games (like 20Q, Rebus, No Vowels/Numbers/Gaps and Hangman);
:orange-ribbon: orange for Mad Libs and its derivatives;
:pink-ribbon: pink for creative contests (like art and writing contests);
:red-ribbon: red for prediction contests;
:white-ribbon: white for image guessing contests (such as "Guess the Cropped Image") and their derivatives;
:yellow-ribbon: yellow for caption contests and their derivatives;
:green-ribbon: 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.
Miscellaneous

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) 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)

7) 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!
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CJ
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A very minor case of serious brain damage

Updated to reflect the addition of Official Awards.
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CJ
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A very minor case of serious brain damage

Updated to reflect a change in what the :red-ribbon: Red Ribbon represents.

Instead of being awarded for caption contests, the Red Ribbon is now awarded for prediction contests. The reason for this is that we do a lot more prediction contests than caption contests, so I think they're more worthy of their own category.

Any :yellow-ribbon: Yellow Ribbons that have been awarded for previous prediction contests will remain yellow, but any future ribbons for prediction contests will be red.
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CJ
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A very minor case of serious brain damage

Updated with a new rule: any contest that is not completed within two months of its start date will be declared null and void. This is to prevent contests from sitting around at the bottom of the forum for months while we wait for them to finish (especially prediction contests which don't have a definite end point).

Note that this rule only applies to contests started after I make this post. All current contests will be allowed to run to completion.
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CJ
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A very minor case of serious brain damage

Updated to reflect some changes to the ribbon categories:
  • :yellow-ribbon: Yellow Ribbons, which had previously been awarded for miscellaneous contests, are now awarded only for caption contests. The vast majority of these have been awarded for caption contests in the past anyway.
  • The 'Connecting Walls and Derivatives' category has been abolished, and :green-ribbon: Green Ribbons are now awarded for miscellaneous contests. Any Yellow Ribbons that had previously been awarded for non-caption contests have been re-coloured to green (or another category if appropriate).
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CJ
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A very minor case of serious brain damage

Updated to reflect a category change: :orange-ribbon: Orange Ribbons now represent Mad Libs as opposed to Open Challenges.
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CJ
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A very minor case of serious brain damage

Updated to reflect the addition of a new category: "Guess the Cropped Image" contests (and similar ones) will now award :white-ribbon: White Ribbons.
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CJ
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A very minor case of serious brain damage

I've made a couple of edits to the rules:

  • Posts may no longer be given away as prizes. Nobody's actually done this for over three years, since the Coffee Credits system was introduced to replace them; however, it did remain in the rules if anyone wanted to use it. Now, it's no longer in there.
  • When a contest host wins a prize in their own contest, their prize will now be given to them from the newly-established Coffee Credit Bank account.
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CJ
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A very minor case of serious brain damage

I've condensed the rules a bit, and stripped out a couple that I didn't think were really necessary. A couple of them were more appropriate as suggestions rather than rules - and these have been moved to a new "Reference and Recommendations" thread :) .

One new rule, however, is that Official Awards may not be given away for quizzes if the answers can simply be looked up on the internet. (This applies even if the host specifies a "No looking up the answers" rule, because there's no way to enforce it)
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