Contests: restricting number of images that may be submitted

[jdougher]

How does one restrict the number of images that may be submitted to a contest?

[Chuck S]

You can not restrict per person the number of uploads. I mean you can do it globally per day upload limit but not per category. You can set the number of photos a category can contain but thats not per user.

[jdougher]

Originally Posted by Chuck S

You can not restrict per person the number of uploads. I mean you can do it globally per day upload limit but not per category. You can set the number of photos a category can contain but thats not per user.

This would seem to me to be a basic requirement of photography contests, right? There needs to be a way for user x to be limited to entering y number of photos. Otherwise it's not a fair contest.

[Chuck S]

That would be one idea of how to do it. I can only answer based on the features that exist in the software.

[spagman_729816]

did anybody figure out how to do this?

[Chuck S]

You would have to by chance check the mod forums out. There would not be any code mods posted in support.

[jdougher]

Originally Posted by Chuck S

That would be one idea of how to do it.

What's another idea that would make sense in the context of the software?

[Chuck S]

I am just saying over the years I have heard many different ideas on how customers expect contests to work. You ask 10 people yours going to get 10 different answers.

[jdougher]

Originally Posted by Chuck S

I am just saying over the years I have heard many different ideas on how customers expect contests to work. You ask 10 people yours going to get 10 different answers.

What I'm saying is that I've never heard of a contest for which unlimited entries are allowed. It's usually "Limit one (1) Entry per person." This seems to me as essential to the idea of a contest as voting. But oh well.

[Chuck S]

Well our software only allows one vote per user so I am following that comment then . Not sure where you get the idea that our voting allows a user more than one entry.

[jdougher]

Originally Posted by Chuck S

Well our software only allows one vote per user so I am following that comment then . Not sure where you get the idea that our voting allows a user more than one entry.

Your software does only allow one vote per user. That's true. What it doesn't allow is the purchaser of the software to limit the number of entries that may be submitted to a contest.

So, user X could submit 1,000 photos to a contest while user Y might submit 1. And there's nothing I can do about it?

[Chuck S]

That would be true yes. You can only limit per usergroup filesize and overall diskspace restrictions as well as x amount uploads per day.

[Steve_UK]

..just to add a comment as someone who runs contests nonstop on our Photopost systems..

We have contests that allow 1 upload, or 3, or 5 per month or whatever. Getting software to restrict things to so many per day week or month or user would be very hard.. simply saying it is what it is has worked for us for many years with no bother at all.

ie just tell em! If it is 2 entries per month then anyone with any sense will make only up to 2 entries per month, you can put the info on the category description and message boxes etc. All competitions have rules and if you break them you don't win.

If some clown uploads more you can either delete the extra ones, or more likely just disqualify them when the winner is being decided.. as they broke the rules.

Likewise we have a rule that only photos taken inside the competition dates can win... so only where the EXIF info shows December 2010 or whatever. Doing that with software could be tricky.. just looking at the EXIF of anything that looks set to win and disqualifying it if the EXIF is outside the time limit seems simple enough.

I hope that helps a little.

Steve

[Chuck S]

As with any software this one has alot of features but you can not be everything to everyone and have ever feature people want. The Pro gallery has so many features its hard to keep straight all the features it has.

[jdougher]

Originally Posted by Chuck S

As with any software this one has alot of features but you can not be everything to everyone and have ever feature people want. The Pro gallery has so many features its hard to keep straight all the features it has.

Ah, just as I suspected, we have a contest in which a couple of people have uploaded more than the number of images allowed. This is a nuisance. I have to believe few use this contest feature. The implementation is poor.

[jdougher]

Originally Posted by Steve_UK

I hope that helps a little.

Steve

Steve, since you run so many contests, when you end voting, does the contest category automatically sort the images by number of votes received? My photopost installation does not do this.

[Steve_UK]

JD,

No I don't think I've ever seen it do that.

What we do is to glance at the entries at the end of the voting and and see who we want to declare as the winner... and sometimes if it is close we may decide to declare a 1st 2nd and 3rd or whatever.

We tend to then move all the non winning entries out to the normal photo areas and leave just the winners on show in that competition area, with a large "Winner" graphic added to the photo descriptions of those winners etc.

We also add a winner entry to a field we created for each member in VB, and that shows up their wins on their VB Profile page.. so they get glory in both the ended competition area and their profile. We tend to also post a forum message that links to the winning entries - and we have a competitions forum to explain how each competition works and then to say who won it etc.

We've used VB and PP latest versions for this for many years without any problems.

Just to ramble about ways to do things a little more.. we also run quite a few competitions where we don't use the voting system to decide the winner.. we have it decided by our Webmasters as that can sometimes seem a better idea.

You call PP poor because you let some people upload more than they are allowed... surely the uploader and the moderator that released them for viewing are the ones to blame.. The uploader should be disqualified and the moderator removed perhaps...

PP hasn't got and has never had a setting for number of entries to a competition. If you want one added you'd need to do that yourself, or pay someone to do it, or make a pleasant request for such a thing in the next PP version in the suggestions area here.

Steve

[Chuck S]

Very well worded post Steve

[jdougher]

Originally Posted by Chuck S

Very well worded post Steve

This is very well worded in your opinion because he voices manual workarounds for what are flaws in this PhotoPost software. There is no reason that one should have to manually scan the entries in a contest in order to find out who has submitted more images than the number allowed. This task is onerous at best, especially in a very busy forum such as ours. Instead, there should be controls that allow administrators to determine how many images may be submitted to a contest (category). This is a BASIC contest parameter that should be handled by the software running the contest, not by an administrator who may be tasked with overseeing a half dozen contests. To add insult to injury, it's not as though your software makes it easy to sort entries by USER to determine who has submitted more than the number of photos allowed. What if we have 250 photos submitted to a contest (not uncommon)? How are we easily supposed to determine who has submitted more than the maximum number of allowed photos???

Put simply, the "contest" functionality of PhotoPost is deficient and amateurishly conceived. Running contests using the "contest" features of PhotoPost is a constant PITA for us.

[Chuck S]

Jdougher no piece of software is going to operate exactly as you wish that is why people modify software. Just because something does not work the way you wish does not mean it is deficient. It simply means it was not designed how you want it.