Random Talk.

[Dae314]

Hey! Hey! Listen!

Guys we're close to 1000 posts . If other people are willing to join the pot, lets see if we can pool together a decent gil reward to give to the person who makes the 1000th post . I'm currently able to donate 2k gil to the pot (since I recently moved most of my checkings into my savings).

[lemmingllama]

Well, I am proud that there is almost 1000 posts, this place really did take over from the CB. But anyhoo, wouldnt a reward just make no-one want to post number 999?

[Dae314]

Well, I am proud that there is almost 1000 posts, this place really did take over from the CB. But anyhoo, wouldnt a reward just make no-one want to post number 999?

True. There's a couple ways around this:

1) Ask EO to overlook any double posting that happens in posts 999 and 1000

I don't like this solution since it encourages spam so instead...

2) Again allow a double post, but put a restriction on the type of post 1000 needs to be.

Make it have to be a funny picture, a short interesting story, whatever sounds good and is interesting.

Anyone who agrees to fund the reward gets a vote as to whether the reward is given and voting discussion among judges would be done in this thread.

Alternatively, instead of making a vote just have each person who agreed to donate figure out for themselves whether the 1000th poster deserves their donation or not.

If the 1000th post is terrible we can simply ignore it and redo this at another milestone such as 1500 or 5000 or something.

3) The problem with 2 is that if the 1000th post is terrible nobody wins. That's pretty lame so instead... We could set it up (we'd basically just have to have someone watching) so that one of us would make a new contest thread as soon as the 1000th post is made. This thread would work the same way as I described above where each person donating to the reward would get to judge the entries in the thread except we'd allow multiple entries so there should be one winner (or if not we will narrow things down until we get 1 winner). It would basically be a "people-of-the-chat-thread-funded-1000th-post-celebration-contest"

Alternatively, each judge could just give their donation to whoever they think did best.

4) The problem with 3 is that we don't really have a closing date. We'd just have to set one randomly like 72 hours after the thread is opened or something. To fix this we could make the contest thread now and say it's closed after the 1000th post is made here.

I don't like 4 as much because then the contest kinda loses connection with the chat thread celebration. I'd rather set an arbitrary 72 hours/24 hours/whatever and have the thread open on the 1000th post.

[Leviathan]

I was thinking of joining in the random discussions which takes place in this thread( was waiting to see if you guys started talking about something which I knew). But anyhow it seems I can't join in the discussion now( not until the 1000th post is made). If I do, then some might think that I am going for the gil.

[lemmingllama]

I was thinking of joining in the random discussions which takes place in this thread( was waiting to see if you guys started talking about something which I knew). But anyhow it seems I can't join in the discussion now( not until the 1000th post is made). If I do, then some might think that I am going for the gil.

Why not just join? The gil thing isnt set in stone. And since it is random talk, you can just start up a conversation about anything. Like maybe I want to talk about fluffy pink elephants that can fly by expelling lots of methane.

@Dae Personally I would just say that we should start a separate contest thread with rules and stuff, then the random thread can stay as it is and we can maybe start up a new tradition

[Leviathan]

That sounds good. So what were you guys talking about.

[Dae314]

@Dae Personally I would just say that we should start a separate contest thread with rules and stuff, then the random thread can stay as it is and we can maybe start up a new tradition

Ya, I like #3 too. Seeing as we're the only 2 people cooperating with this right now and #3 seems like the most logical approach anyway lets go with that. We still need to figure some things out though.

1) Rules

I'm thinking of having contest rules that reflect the randomness of the random chat thread. Basically what I outlined above in that any type of media or composition is accepted, and it just has to be interesting enough to catch the judge's attention. The works should be original (i.e. posting a new youtube meme is not a valid entry) and judges will be the people who are donating to the reward. This doesn't mean the people donating can't participate though as I said in my previous post. Each user should only be able to submit 1 entry.

2) Judging

Judge's discussion can happen either in the thread or here since with more than 2 or 3 judges trying to do things via PM gets messy. In order to choose 1 and only 1 winner and have each vote be 100% fair without getting into messy numbers, I would suggest a tournament style judging system. Basically the judges should choose a small set of entries which were exceptional (5-10 would be a good number). Then set the entries up in a tournament style tree. Each pairing is voted on and the winning entry advances. Winning entries are voted against winning entries until there's only 1 left. 1 person should probably arbitrate this process. If there's only 1 arbiter and voting for the winner is done tournament style, the judges votes can be kept secret too (since each judge would just pm their votes for the round to the arbiter and the arbiter can count them up). The winning/competing entries would need to be announced after each round by the arbiter though in order to inform the judges of what they need to vote on next.

3) Time limit

I think limiting the time to submit entries to 72 hours would be enough although if people request extensions on this first time the time can vary. If there's obviously no new entries for a while then the time can be shortened too. Future iterations of this can nail down the time limit much more solidly and make things more organized, but I think a somewhat variable time limit on the first try would be a good idea.

4) Donors and payout

We need more gil donors. If we can make the reward pot over 10k gil, we can probably get some good participation. The donors get the benefit of being judges. Of course donors can't judge their own entry, but there's a problem if the donor wins. The donor can't pay for themselves so we would need to some how set up a system that allows donors to still get full payout. I mentioned earlier that 1 person should be arbiter for the contest. This person can be considered the host and top judge. Perhaps we could make that position available to whoever's willing to fill in the extra gil if one of the other judges wins. If the arbiter wins then it gets complicated =/. I don't see a good way around that, but since there's only 1 arbiter as opposed to a variable number of judges (n>=1) I think it's better. Perhaps to compensate, the arbiter should be allowed an extra vote or something (although the arbiter should still be restricted from voting his/her own entry). Payout would happen on an individual basis. Each donor who promised to give their gil to the reward would need to send their promised amount to the winner individually. This would need to be done purely on the honor system although since the donor list isn't private the winner can complain to the arbiter if one person didn't pay out. Still, there's not much the arbiter can do but go and complain to the donor . This is the best way to do the payout to minimize the tax hit.

5) Repetition

You mentioned tradition. That's exactly what I was going for with this :3. I would like to make it a tradition for the random chat thread (and the members who post here frequently) to host contests like this. It seems like a nice thing to do, and it's relatively random and fun ^-^. Of course if this first attempt flops then this will be a 1 time deal unless someone tries to reignite it. However, if it goes on it'd be nice to have the contest happen either at milestones in the chat thread OR move it so that it happens once a year on a certain date (maybe the date that we make 1000 ). This should be discussed after this first attempt though.

So, if people are willing to accept the contest guidelines that I laid out above, all we need is a bunch of people willing to donate gil to the contest. Although most of my money is tied up in savings right now, I'd be willing to withdraw some of it in order to compensate for a judge winning and act as arbiter for this round :3. The more people we have donate, the more interesting the contest will become.

[Stuy]

anyone remember the chicken f**king episode of south park? (that was the first random thing to pop into my mind XD)

also has anyone seen AKB0048 it a new subbed anime that's out and it random as hell ^^

[lemmingllama]

@Dae Sounds good, I can definately judge. Only thing is that I dont have any kind of really special skills to enter something, but im sure that we can fix it. There should be some kind of limit on what people can submit. So we need a clear set of rules!

And one other thing, the chances of 5-10 entries is slim...

@Stuy I do actually want to watch AKB0048 at some point, but I will probably wait until all the episodes are out. Is it any good?

[VolvoKing]

I would post more but there are a lot of subjects I can't relate to. So I stay quiet.

[lemmingllama]

I would post more but there are a lot of subjects I can't relate to. So I stay quiet.

If you cant relate to subjects, why not just start some that you can relate to? Then im sure that there will be at least one person who can also relate and a new topic is born!

[Leviathan]

Well the contest thought is a nice one. It will definitely energize the forum. Trying to make this a tradition should also be appreciated. Also we need to be careful against spammers who might disrupt the flow of the contest. But the judging system seemed to me to be a little comclicated. Can't we have just something like this:

Let's say there are 5 judges and the prize is 10k gil. Then each judge will pay 2k gil each to the winner. One of the 5 judges will be the arbiter to whom the rest 4 will report about the votes, etc. Now if the arbiter wins, then the rest 4 will pay him 8k gil and the arbiter will keep his own 2k to himself. This goes for the rest 4 of the judges too. There's no reason to give the arbiter the advantage of an extra vote or something like that. Now the question remains is "Who gets to choose the judges" and "why should the judges pay 2k for free every time someone wins". I mean you can't expect someone to just pay up 2k gil and not get any kind of advantage for this. Of course, if someone chooses to donate the gils as prize money without taking any advantage then all the better for the contest. This is just my thought though.

[Dae314]

tl;dr is below.

The reason for the complicated reward system is because I thought that donors would be less inclined to donate if they realized that they wouldn't win the "entire" pot since they're donating to it . If people don't have a problem with that then it is much simpler to just have 1 arbiter who's just a lead judge who talleys all the votes and declares the winners with no other benefits than that.

As for funding, I was hoping for people to volunteer a small amount of gil for the right to have a say in the winner. Basically, if you didn't donate to the reward then you don't get to say who wins (inverse for donors). There's currently no benefit for donors who give more gil, but that's because I don't have donors yet . I'm the only one who's pledged 2k. If I got more people pledging I could see what the average donation is, and I would be able to then add weight to each person's vote. As it stands, if someone comes and donates 5k (2.5x my donation) I would do nothing since if there are only 2 judges and 1 judge has 2.5x more votes than the other judge, then there might as well only be 1 judge . Vote weighting will happen if and only if there are enough donors AND there's a big enough variation in donation amounts to justify it (so if 5 people all donate between 2000 and 2050 gil there's no reason to weight them differently ).

Spam protection is provided already by the mods and the contest system . The way I envisioned this, the contest would be funded by the people who post in the random chat thread (imagine us as a small party within the kametsu community putting on an event for everyone). If the tradition becomes every 1000th post, there will be the temptation for people to spam this thread up to speed up the contest frequency. This is an idiotic idea though because:

1) Moderating spam comments in 1 thread is easily done, and mods visit this place.

2) Since this is community funded, if the donors don't have enough gil to fund a contest at the time of the 1000th post the reward will be tiny .

3) If this brings a lot of legitimate attention to the random chat thread and we get a larger number of posts per day, we can simply compensate by changing the contest to happen every 5k or 10k posts .

Spamming within the contest thread would also be moderated by the mods, and those entries wouldn't be considered by the judges anyway . I think the way the contest is being set up presents a pretty solid defense against exploitation.

The way I described the judging is to avoid situations like this:

Choice of 3 entries for the win:

Entry 1 gets 3 votes

Entry 2 gets 2 votes

Entry 3 gets 2 votes

Entry 1 wins right? Wrong. Entry 1 got the most votes, but MORE people (4) voted against Entry 1 than for entry 1. Therefore, entry 1 really doesn't have the judges' majority. The easiest way to fix this is to just make the voting happen on entries 1 and 2. Then take the winner of that vote and vote with it again against the last entry. So with more entries, we'd just set up a bunch of face-off situations where the winners would face each other. It's the same as a tournament style organization.

tl;dr

The incentive for donating to the contest is:

1) You get to be a judge (only donors will get a vote)

2) You will make what should be a fun event better

3) You want to see this contest succeed and become a tradition

4) Dae314 will thank you

Also spamming shouldn't be a problem because of the way I've set up the contest.

Finally, I made the voting that way to avoid ambiguous situations.

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edit:

I think this contest needs a theme. I'm considering doing something easy:

1) Short story - genre: humor

Entries must be short stories (less than some word count like 2000 or something I'm not counting). The judges will look for the funniest.

2) Short story - genre: drama

Entries must be short stories again, but the judges will be looking for the best drama.

3) Short story - genre: fairy tale

Judges are looking for the best original fairy tale.

4) AMV

I'd like to stay away from this one if possible. It's hard to verify the origins of an amv that someone posts as an entry, and it involves a lot of work so I don't think people would want to do it.

5) Picture of yourself in a situation from an anime

Judges are looking for the best photograph of the entrant reenacting something from an anime. This is also somewhat hard and I wouldn't like it to be done on the first iteration of this.

6) Drawing of an anime character

Judges will be looking for the best drawing of some anime character.

There's so many more ideas I'm not sure what to choose. I'm leaning toward stories though. We could widen it to include comics also. Generally entries need to have a plot and story . Or instead of restricting genre, we would just ask for short stories. Regardless, stories are relatively easy to make, and as long as we don't demand some length people can make entries in less than an hour .

[Leviathan]

You know, I think there should be constant prize money in the contest and constant number of donators/judges. Let's say that the prize money would be 10k gil and each donator will have to donate 2k gil each. In return the donators will be given the job of the judges. As for the arbiter, the 5 judges can then decide who should have that post. Then no one can come up and say " Hey, I donated more than anyone so give me this special advantage". Also, then the prize money wouldn't have to be reduced just because we couldn't find donators. I mean the amount 2k is pretty small and anyone can pay it without much trouble.

The defense mechanism against the spammers is pretty standard, so no complaints here. Also I loved the tournament style judging system. This would make it easier to judge.

It seems you have introduced 6 types of things which can be posted in order to compete in the contest. Now, I only have one question. In a certain contest are people allowed to introduce any one of those above 6 things? Or is it that in contest#1 the contestants are allowed to introduce only writings of any kind(short stories, drama, poem, etc), then contest#2 will be a drawing contest and so on?

[lemmingllama]

From what I understood, there would be some kind of theme and then people could make any type of media to represent it, at least from the previous chat. So there would be a theme like romance, and then you could make a story, AMV, gfx, whatever. I think that Dae is now leaning more towards one theme with one kind of entry for people.

A gil tournament tradition with set rules is alright. I can be a judge, honestly I dont know what to do with my gil so tournaments works out well

[Leviathan]

From what I understood, there would be some kind of theme and then people could make any type of media to represent it, at least from the previous chat. So there would be a theme like romance, and then you could make a story, AMV, gfx, whatever. I think that Dae is now leaning more towards one theme with one kind of entry for people.

Well that makes sense. But I don't know about AMVs. I mean AMVs are totally different from anything like stories or poems or gfx. Wouldn't it make judging a little difficult?

A gil tournament tradition with set rules is alright. I can be a judge, honestly I dont know what to do with my gil so tournaments works out well

Well i don't have any problem donating 2k gil either. But I have another question........Is it a must for a donator/judge to compete in this contest?

[Dae314]

It's hard to standardize the number of judges since this contest is running on donations and I want to offer SOME kind of reward for donating . However, standardizing the donation wouldn't be too hard. For this round, I'm going to name a minimum donation of 2k gil. Then I can say that anything above 2k gil is completely voluntary and doesn't give you any benefits. You donate more ONLY because you want to see the contest succeed. By definition then, the reward amount can't be standardized either. In the contest thread though, I will state the reward amount and who the judges are. If more donors come during the time the contest is active, the reward and the judge list will change.

For theme, I want to narrow down the type of entries we receive. So that list I put up earlier is a pick one type of list. I'm liking the idea of short story for this round since it's an easy entry that doesn't take a long time to create. So entry type=short story. Now for entry theme I'm not sure what to go with. We could leave the theme open and let entrants write any type of short story they want. Or we can choose a single theme for them to write about. I'm personally thinking about fairy tale as a theme for this one since it's an easy genre to write for.

Also, judges are not forced to participate. I'm just emphasizing that participation for judges is still an option.

[Apocalypse_Pony]

Lets talk about the end of the world when the apocalypse is among us and all seven seals are broken,

[VolvoKing]

I thought we were already living in hell on earth. By watching the news and looking at the weather you would think so.

[Koby]

Hell on earth? That's every day living.