welcome to the complainatorium

Sep 08, 2009 15:38

Someone on my flist recently used the word "complainatorium"... I think. I'm stealing it. FYI.

It's madness I tell you.

So for the first time ever, I'm modding a LIMS - xf_lims. Perhaps you've seen me pimp it a bajillion times. o__O

At first it was AWESOME. The participation has been of the CRAZIEST quality... everyone's on time with their stuff, only a couple out of 23 dropped out because of not submitting/whatever... voting was really straight forward for most of the challenges...

And then in the last couple of weeks it all kinda went to shit.

The quality is still out-of-this-world... and everyone is still on time with their submissions... but see THAT's NOT HELPING! :)

1) All of the icons are ridiculous good. This is a GREAT problem to have, honestly... but it makes the voting EXTREMELY difficult. The voting requirements ask that when voting for "least fave" (actually "lowest quality"), you state an objective reason and address the QUALITY of the icons... and not your personal preference.

As the weeks went on and we got down to fewer and fewer makers, I started to be really particular/picky about the concrit comments... mostly because as the weeks went on and we got down to fewer and fewer makers, it was harder for the voters to FIND fault with the quality of the icons. :/ So I ended up with a lot of "The colour's too dull", "It's not as interesting as the others", "The lack of text bothers me" kind of votes... And since EVERY vote, essentially, affects the outcome, I can't let those slide.

I feel like a bitch when I ask people to restate their comments... especially after I've pimped and BEGGED for votes... and especially since I, too, have left similar non-helpful comments when voting in LIMS (tho that's changing).

2) I have ALWAYS been worried about two things:
- fucking up the vote tally
- participating in my own LIMS

I took on xf_lims because there were NO active XF-specific LIMS going... just a couple of Gillian Anderson LIMS. I started it because I wanted to play... but as the weeks went on and I made it thru challenge after challenge, it really bothered me more and more. I trust myself to be fair in tallying votes but I trust myself less in picking caps that might challenge me. I didn't win a damn thing weeks 1 thru 8... but the last two weeks, I've been a landslide victor. :/ In this last challenge, my victory brings me into the finals... which would be FINE if the rest of the votes were clearer but they weren't. I eliminate two icons per week and there was, in essence a tie for the second least favourite. My normal system would see me eliminate an icon with fewer negative votes than one that would stay... and that just didn't seem right.

So I kept both icons that were competing for the second least-favourite spot and withdrew. :/

Now I feel guilty for taking a victory away from someone else. If I'd not entered the semi-finals, who knows what the fuck would have happened!!!!

OMG now I feel worse.

This is seriously taking a toll on me. I want to be fair and make the right decisions but these days - with everything else in my life totally fucked up right now - I can't even do this right.

I do know two things:
- I'm not entering next round. PERIOD.
- I'm changing how the voting system is run.

I know we're talking about ICONS here... and while we joke that it's "very srs business", in the grander scheme of things in life, it's so totally not that important that I lose sleep and sit on my couch and cry about it (trufax, people)... but I respect all of the makers who entered and don't want them to feel short-changed, cheated, robbed... especially since it's been nearly three months of icon making to get to this point.

Sigh.

Don't feel the need to reply... I'm really just putting it all down so that I can TRY and make some peace of things. If you're reading this and you're one of the iconmakers at xf_lims , I'm SO sorry... for being a fuck-up mod. :/

complaining

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