IMPORTANT: New Contest Information

[amberdh]

G'day fellow farmers

First and foremost, we would like to thank everyone for their participation in the monthly farm contests. The response has been overwhelming and the decorating talent out there is mind boggling to say the very least. Kudos!

Second, a fair amount of constructive feedback and well thought out suggestions have been posted in the forum and have been sent via private message to the forum team. We encourage feedback so that this contest will be the best it can possibly be. So for that, thank you for your responses, you have been heard loud and clear....

One prevalent concern has been that 'picture' farms, farms predominantly decorated with crates/flowers, seem to be winning over farms decorated with other items from the store.

To rectify this, the January 2012 contest will be a little different. There will be no theme in January. Rather, anyone wishing to participate, posts their best work and all entries will be divided into four categories. The contestant will choose which category they feel their farm fits best and one winner will be chosen from each. Each winner will receive 100 farmcash. So please, even if you have participated in the contest in the past, re-read the requirements closely as there will be some changes.

We will run this new method on a trial basis. Once the contest has been closed and winners announced we will again collect feedback and will see what/if changes need to be made.

Another concern put forth has been in the way that winners are currently being chosen. What we have been doing is once the contest closes and each forum team member (all the moderators and helpers) have visited each entry, everyone then posts their favourites and the 'votes' are tallied to determine the winners.

There has been a small amount of requests suggesting that all forum users vote on the winners rather than the forum team. While this does sound like a good idea, some feedback has been gathered from similar contests on other forums and this system has often caused many problems.

For example: numerous forum accounts being started by one person so they can vote for one entry multiple times; or contestants 'advertising' their entries outside the forum to gain more votes. Many issues would have to be discussed and details worked out before we could even think about implementing user voting here.

Something everybody needs to keep in mind is that the contest needs to be kept as least cumbersome as possible. If it gets to the point that the rest of the forum is being neglected because the forum team is spending an exceedingly large amount of time taking care of the contest, the contest will have to be shut down. This is something that we would like to avoid at all costs and I am sure you all do as well.

Thank you all, again, for your participation, feedback and suggestions.