Competitions Discussion Thread Part 12

mjm3346

purplecatlover wrote: »

but it wouldnt be a fair poll until using the regular board has been tried by everyone for a while. once people get into the habit of remembeirng to swing by and check for new posts in there (to enter once only rather than everyday if thats what they want to do) people may decide they like ahving those posts off main. now people are objecting to the *idea* of using it with no experience of having tried it.

How is needing to look in several places for competitions better for the average user than only needing to look in one place?

Simple, it is not.

The enter button works fine on the main board, it does not on regulars unless you mess around with enter/unenter or have some other workround.

Is it better

a) to be able to see and sort all the competitions in one go and see at a glance what you have entered

or

b) have to trawl through several places and even then not have a usable enter button?

fortuna93

Yes but it's not fair making people change something that wasn't broken in the first place. People are happy using the main bored and some people use the regs, you can't please everyone and surely you go with the majority?

sp1derwebs

purplecatlover wrote: »

the forum update emails i ahve found are very irregular, they work fine for a few days then not for a few weeks. tbh ive found them a bit of a waste really as there are generally 200ish comps added a day and its much quicker to just come to the forum and look at them down the main listings.

thanks i really appreciate you taking the time to reply. so i shall just literally scroll thru the first few pages until i come to a point where i start to recognise where i last left off? I have learned to thank so thats been a great tip

fortuna93

If you use the enter button as well it leaves a little green tick on the page so you can easily see where you left off

bargainhuntergal

mjm3346 wrote: »

How is needing to look in several places for competitions better for the average user than only needing to look in one place?

Simple, it is not.

The enter button works fine on the main board, it does not on regulars unless you mess around with enter/unenter or have some other workround.

Is it better

a) to be able to see and sort all the competitions in one go and see at a glance what you have entered

or

b) have to trawl through several places and even then not have a usable enter button?

Unless each single competition is posted as a single entity so you can see at a glance whether you've entered that single competition or not, there's no difference to how the enter button works whether in Regulars or on the Main board :huh: (unless you mean the proposed move of putting things like Chat and TAB in their own updated threads rather than on their own as they are now? The ones that have already been moved over are working no differently than they would have on the Main board, they're just in a different place.)

I think it would work better to have each competition posted on it's own in the main board and not bumped up with a new answer each time, but each new day/week/month posted as a seperate thread, because end date enterers miss so many already the way they work now, and we're having to rely a lot on Gilla and PPD's lists. If it was to work that way the only ones needing to go into the daily/weekly/monthly lists are the ones for which you enter once and go into every draw until the end, or the ones where you enter the same answer everyday and go into a final draw.

At the moment, I don't think a vote would work as the options need to be clearly defined and explained so a reasoned decision can be made on which option (of many) would be the best, obviously it was always going to cause a divide.

But the current talk has arisen from confusion at the system as it is at the moment, so clearly this system isn't working for everyone.

To be honest though, I think all talk of this should stop until the new year as it's already an incredibly busy time for everyone including the BG's with all the extra comps to move around, and until a proper discussion can take place when there's time to consider and make a decision then no real changes will be made (if they're even made at all depending on the decision).

purplecatlover

mjm3346 wrote: »

How is needing to look in several places for competitions better for the average user than only needing to look in one place?

Simple, it is not.

The enter button works fine on the main board, it does not on regulars unless you mess around with enter/unenter or have some other workround.

Is it better

a) to be able to see and sort all the competitions in one go and see at a glance what you have entered

or

b) have to trawl through several places and even then not have a usable enter button?

for me personally i tend to ignore main board if im short on time and head to regular threads...would eb regular board instead. i find scrolling through hundreds of new comps or comps by end date on main daunting when i have heaps of time.

if your onlu going to enter them once then regs will be the same as main as far as clicking entered goes. if you want the new question/answer each day then subscribe to the thread and use your thanks to terack as im sure you do now for advents/other daily/weekly answer threads...or choose to stick with only main.

but we are all different and we all comp in different ways. i was just suggesting that something maybe shouldnt be shouted down until its been tried?

purplecatlover

bargainhuntergal wrote: »

I think it would work better to have each competition posted on it's own in the main board and not bumped up with a new answer each time, but each new day/week/month posted as a seperate thread, because end date enterers miss so many already the way they work now, and we're having to rely a lot on Gilla and PPD's lists. .

they wouldnt get missed if they were on regs and not mixed in among the hundreds of comps on main. well not by me anyway as i would simply check regs for new comps/posts and enter them after ive been in daily thread and before i go near main which i skip entirely when im short on time. not missed by others either if they just added one extra area to check into their list, it takes what a whole minute, maybe two minutes more to open a sub forum, check for new comps there and then revert to main as normal.

also those of us who comp by end date on main but keep up with regs then wouldnt be missing so many chances at entries.

but i love the regular lists which all the people who dont want them or regs board dont use and i comp by end date so miss out on lots of comps that people cant be bothered to notify gilla about.

mjm3346

purplecatlover wrote: »

but i love the regular lists which all the people who dont want them or regs board dont use and i comp by end date so miss out on lots of comps that people cant be bothered to notify gilla about.

I have nothing against the lists where they are all pulled togeather but to take the sci-fi one as an example why take the actual post from the main board where everyone can find it and hide it away where you have look elsewhere for it?

As far as I can see it makes no difference to anyone using regulars where clicking on the link on the list takes them to, removing them from the main board means people miss out unless they spend more time looking.

not missed by others either if they just added one extra area to check into their list

So everyone should have to spend longer searching because of the way a few people choose to enter?

bargainhuntergal

purplecatlover wrote: »

they wouldnt get missed if they were on regs and not mixed in among the hundreds of comps on main. well not by me anyway as i would simply check regs for new comps/posts and enter them after ive been in daily thread and before i go near main which i skip entirely when im short on time. not missed by others either if they just added one extra area to check into their list, it takes what a whole minute, maybe two minutes more to open a sub forum, check for new comps there and then revert to main as normal.

also those of us who comp by end date on main but keep up with regs then wouldnt be missing so many chances at entries.

but i love the regular lists which all the people who dont want them or regs board dont use and i comp by end date so miss out on lots of comps that people cant be bothered to notify gilla about.

I know I said it was best to leave all the talk about this until next year, but as you replied to my post I thought I'd better reply now otherwise I'll forget!

In the end, if any changes are made it's going to be about compromise, I understand why the Regulars board looks confusing to people that don't use it, that was really why I made the suggestion (separate thread for each day/week/month on main board) that I did a few months ago.

I saw that as the compromise option, it doesn't involve using the Regulars too much for people that don't now, but it also means people that enter by end date don't miss anything. I thought that was a good compromise?

The only people it means a little more work for are the BG's as there are more threads to move to Game Over if they're all separate, but it would be much more organised and wouldn't involve anything like what Glad is doing now over on the Regulars (ie. a major effort sorting the years old threads) on a regular basis, as they would all naturally move to Game Over every day/week/month.

I actually couldn't believe the suggestion made the other day that perhaps people wanted the threads moving over so less people enter and the people that do have more chance of winning! This is the complete opposite of what all this talk about changes is for, at the moment, people are missing being able to enter until very late on with some competitions (when entering by end date from the main board) the talk of changes is so that no one misses any entries they can make regardless of how they like to enter.

When you think about it, if entering from the main board either by end date or as they are posted is working for the majority of people at the moment, then maybe it's only very small changes that need to be made?

So like either another sticky or couple of stickies on the regulars that work like the dailies etc, one for enter once and be in all draws competitions, this way people who enter as they're posted will be in straight away as they would normally because it's posted on the main board, and people that enter by end date can check the sticky thread (providing it's been sent to someone to add to it) and everyone's happy?

Anything that has multiple entries for multiple draws, but the draws aren't like once a week, once a month etc could be posted as separate threads for each draw? Or there could be another sticky for comps of this type?

For anything that has multiple entries for one draw can either go in dailies/weeklies/monthlies depending on how often entries are allowed?

I would imagine these would be relatively small changes and shouldn't cause too much hassle for anyone that enters as things are posted off the main board? But would help solve the problems others are having at the moment?

purplecatlover

adding a sticky for comps that have different answers every day would mean who ever maintained it had to update all the links every single day.
if all the regular comps posted on main got added to gillas thread then that would be fine...but that doesnt happen. gilla depends on people telling her when there are new ones that need added which the majority of people dont do (thank you to those of you who do add links in the thread), in the same way a lot of people dont bother to request merges....it takes too much time to find the other thread and pm a bg so people pretend they havent seen (thank you to those of you who do take the time to pm merges).

the likes of the sci fi comps work as threads on main linked in dailies, but those that require daily answers get complained about becuase they are bumped everyday and get missed by people who dont manage to keep 100%on top of new posts...i dont know what the compromise is...but i cant see the problem with trying it another way then another if necessary until something is found that works for almost everyone.

take the advents for example...should each of those be posted as an individual comp every single day? they almost all require daily entry but thats nearly 200 comps on top of the normla 200odd comps usually added as new comps. i see doing that as doubling the length of time taken to go through main for everyone whereas them all in one thread people can ignore them completely if they wish to or enter them and ignore main.

the way i see it having to open one more link to check subforum for new comps would add a couple of minutes at the most to time taken...but thats the way i see it and mayube im missing something incredibly obvious to those of you that enter by methods other than end date?

anyway can anyone tell me how to get a link to a specific tweet please? instea dof just to the twitter profile.