So though the Cornstalks' contest is unofficial, I believe there will be more contests, official and unofficial, in the near future. Also, it would be nice for there to be a forum for it. It's not really a Lounge topic.

We used to have one before one of the forum culls -- I think possibly the one before last.

It was removed after we realised it just sort of sits there with nothing but the occasional spam post the vast (vast) majority of the time. I think it'd be great to have some proper archive of contests, but I'm not entirely convinced a forum is the best way to do so -- although it's certainly a straightforward way of running an in-progress contest.

I'm not saying we definitely won't have one, and by saying that I'm not saying we definitely will -- just raising a couple of points for consideration.

I didn't even know there was a forum specifically for contests. Seems like it needs better placement or advertisement. But does it get any more spammed than the threads in the Workshop forum? If that's a problem, the threads could just be locked after 1 or 2 months after the contest finishes. Plus, if we're doing things like in-progress journals and postmortems, then the actual spam would go down considerably and the meaningful posts would go up (I would think).

You could give each contest it's own page(s), but, even in that scenario, comments would be allowed. So similar concerns would still be an issue.

What if we create a contest forum but limit topic creation to Crossbones+ (just to limit it down)? Anybody would be able to reply.

Sounds good to me. I don't see a problem with that. It'll mostly be more experienced members if not developers making the contests anyway.

What if we create a contest forum but limit topic creation to Crossbones+ (just to limit it down)? Anybody would be able to reply.

Seems like most of the site is Crossbones+ anyway... But yeah, that seems like a good idea, if we make a Competition forum. I don't know if having them in a separate forum would make them more likely to be overlooked or not, though.

I almost think rather than yet another forum we should try to make better use of tagging -- perhaps something that pulls all content tagged as "contest" into a consolidated feed, so that forum topics, journal entries, etc. would all be gathered together. Moderation to add or remove content would be as simple as adding or removing tags, and if we wanted to take it further we could even assign specific tags to certain contests for sub-grouping of content.

Topics could then remain in other appropriate forums for the categorisation and attention that provides, but would also be collected into a unified interface.

I almost think rather than yet another forum we should try to make better use of tagging

-- perhaps something that pulls all content tagged as "contest" into a consolidated feed, so that forum topics, journal entries, etc. would all be gathered together. Moderation to add or remove content would be as simple as adding or removing tags, and if we wanted to take it further we could even assign specific tags to certain contests for sub-grouping of content. Topics could then remain in other appropriate forums for the categorisation and attention that provides, but would also be collected into a unified interface.

I like how ConceptArt.org does it. They have a category: art contests & activities

with two forums:

• art community activities
• challenge & collaboration area

I think the Community Interaction category has a lot of forums already. Another one might be too much.

If there is the danger that nobody will get around to starting contests a forum would probably be a bad idea.

Guess it would be worth it with something regular, even if it is highly automated.

A game contest of the month with a random topic would be cool ... for me even without any prices.

but we don't have that many forums to be begin with, to worry about "yet another forum".

That's only because we went on a massive forum-killing spree twice in the last couple of years.

Plus if you have contests in other forums, the thread(s) will end up getting lost in the threads of that forum. Especially if we're dropping them in the Lounge. Plus, why have users hop around the forums looking for contests when they can go to one place and see them there? If there's looking for a particular type of contest then they can use the tags to filter what they want.

That is what the tagging is for. In theory, at least, we can set up a top-level landing page that accumulates all content with a particular tag.

I'm not opposed to the idea of a competition forum returning, but I think the tagged landing page is a pretty equivalent option.