Submissions Closed

[denisep]

According to my clock, it's now midnight PST, so we are no longer accepting submissions for the style contest. We're going to take a day or two in the office to pull together the submissions and discuss the best way to poll the userbase. Voting will be open soon

Comments

[foz]

Too bad I didn't find about this contest until yesterday, I thought i'd have a pretty good chance of being in the top 5. I actually started a design thinking I would somehow get finished in time, I was pretty close.. until I looked into S2, implementing the design with S2 was going to be the real time killer, considering i've never even looked into it before. I'm fluent with other languages, but I just didn't have time to figure it all out before the deadline. Ah well! =) I'll look forward to the next contest 5 years from now, LOL.

I'm ready to vote!

[xb95]

I'm sure we'll have more! I hope so, anyway. And maybe longer. This one's been pretty good, but it could have used with more time.

And I like your journal style, but it's too thin for me. I like things that use all available screen real estate. (But I guess that's all personal preference!)

[taleriaknt]

It was rather short. And of course, the contest was announced right as my classes started back up. Didn't have the time for this one, but I'll be ready next time. *hopes there's a next time"

[brooke_318]

I sadly didn't know about it until today. :(

[sermoa]

This has been wonderful - it has showed up so much talent!!

I liked xixs' speech bubble theme so much, I've taken it and adapted it for my own journal. I was also most impressed with comradexavier's clever idea for grouping friends entries by userid, to make it look as if they'd written columns in a newspaper. Finally, alastia has some incredible colour functions and texture ideas - I'm sure those ideas could be incorporated into many styles ...!

Thanks for running such an inspiring competition!!! :D

[mart]

While no-one asked me, I'm going to post my opinion on the polling process anyway. I think the best polling process would be to assign each user a given number of points and allow the user to distribute points up to that maximum over the contest entries as they wish. This means that they can either blow all of their points on a layout they really like, or spread them out over a bunch of layouts. They can also use only some of their voting power if they don't really like any of the options that much. The entries with the most points at the end of the voting period are the winners.

This or some variation on it is the way to go in my opinion.

[alsatia]

I like this idea. Before I saw this comment, I was hoping for a "rank your top five choices" method, but that would be more complicated than your suggestion and wouldn't have the flexibility of letting people focus all their votes on a single style.

Since there will be five winners, five sounds like a good number of points to allot to each voter.

[draconid]

I think ten points would be better because you can then weight your choices more - if you want to vote for five and only have five points you can't give one more points than another.

[alsatia]

My thought process, which I just noticed wasn't clear due to my mention of the "ranking five" thing, was that with this method would eliminate the need to literally rank the votes. Everybody gets to pick up to five that they think should be winners, and if they want to give more weight to one then they should have to forfeit the right to pick five.

Giving out ten points would lead to a lot of people picking ten styles (nearly half of the submissions!) due to not wanting to play favorites, not really caring what style wins, not wanting to "waste" votes by not using them, etc. It seems like that could skew the results pretty severely.

[pbristow]

OK, I just tried voting... How do I know if my vote has been registered? On clicking the "Cast your votes" button, all that happens is that the styles get re-listed in a different order, with the some ones ticked. If I click the "cast your votes" button again, the list just gets re-ordered again. Have I now submitted two sets of votes, one, or none?

There needs to be a positive "thankyou for your vote", ideally with "we have registered your votes for... (list of styles)".

[rahaeli]

After submitting the page, the page will have, right above the screenshots, "Your Current Vote:" with the list of what you've voted for. Same URL.

[pbristow]

Ah! OK, yep, goddit. Thanks.

Maybe it could with highlighting somehow, though. It's a tiny change, visually. The re-ordering is what grabs your (OK, my - maybe I'm just weird?*) attention, and the rest of the page looks unchanged.

*(I mean, I know I *am* weird, but I don't think I'm *just* weird...)

[cmshaw]

Is it possible to preview styles which your don't own on your own journal? FAQ 177 says: "For security reasons previewing your style is limited. When logged in, you can preview your style when applied to any journal. However, other users can only preview your style when it is applied to your journal."

However, I could have sworn that this used to be possible -- that you could preview a style with "is_public=1" on your own journal in the usual "?s2id=whatever" fashion. Am I crazy? Is this new?

[phoenixdreaming]

Yep, it used to be possible. I'm assuming it was disabled for the security reasons mentioned, though I'm not certain.