Hello all!

Recently we've all seen how lackluster the activity is around the Lab and the forum here. KCRock's been attempting to lighten the mood with some contests, but they haven't done very well, so he's a bit down. Vidar is busy with real life, but still has time to visit once in a while. Fennex and Umg are... well, missing. And, I have to admit that I'm a bit disappointed at how things are going.

Yesterday I suffered a brainwave while reading about KC's latest attempt at a contest and also surfing around the transformation stories hosted by individual writers over at FurAffinity. I realized that while the Lab is rather slow right now, there are actually several sites for transformation stories. And, with this idea, I formulated a contest idea. I spoke with my remaining confederates today on the subject, and they don't find the idea all that great, but they think it's better than nothing.

Rather than just going with a single guy's thoughts, we decided it would be the perfect time to see how you all think we should run the next contest.



KC and Vidar seem to think this idea won't be very popular, and I have a few doubts of my own, which might just stem from some bad pizza I ate.

So, if anyone has any ideas on what we can do differently, or if you can improve on the idea above, or whatever, please feel free to add a post here. If you don't like the idea at all, or think we should just stop doing stupid contests, feel free to post that too.

We NEED your input on this.

I think it is an OK idea. there are a lot of great TF stories to be found elsewhere, most of which I find on FA. But there are few things to consider. Lets face it, in this economy(America) money is freaking tight honestly I will not donate to this simply because I'm not sure I even have the money to eat after the next rental check on my apartment on university campus. I'm some of the other members here are in the same situation.

Even though this may be the case, maybe we could advertise in places like FA to draw interest here. I'm pretty sure it is perfectly fine to link this forum to any FA forum or comment post though I should probably read their rules before doing so. If we could get a popular TF story artist to advertise this contest in their journal, there is bound to be interest.

A Question: Can we nominate story series or does it have to be a single story from start to finish in one submission? if we could do the first should we post all the links in an orderly fashion to the different parts of the story series?

Hmm, well, right now there's a little bit of money in the till, not enough for a cruise to the Bahamas but perhaps enough that we can send the winner to lunch. And, perhaps the contest will generate more cash as we get the ball rolling.

I had in mind to make Journal entries in the author's FA pages, or a notice on their DA page, or somehow figure out how to let the author know publicly if the story is from another site. At the very least send them an email. And, if they want to opt out of the contest for some odd reason (who'd pass up the chance at free money with no effort?), we can remove that nominated story from the list. We are NOT going to ask that the stories be moved to the Lab for the archive, but I don't think the winning authors would mind to a link to the winning entry. Advertizing the Nominees before the voting and linking the winning entries would benifit both our sites and generate more page views for everyone.

I don't see any reason we couldn't nominate a story series. I'd be bothered if the series was HUGE, but a reasonable story line wouldn't be bad. We can always see if the story series is too large when/if we get one nominated.

I like the idea alot overall.

How will voting be conducted? One round where nominations are made, and then a second round where everyone reads the accepted nominations and votes on them?

I'd prefer it if you hadn't mentioned the money.

I think Vidar has thought of an idea too.

We made process news, so we just need to keep ourselves clear on which idea we use, we could use both, but have this one be a much lower prize. $10-15 for first place $5-10 runner up.

Sounds good to me. For now, I'm thinking Nov 15th to Dec 15th for nominations, and from Dec 16th to Jan 1st, 2010 for voting. Gives us some time to look over the material. We might consiter putting a 3 Nominations per registered user here to limit the number of entries, but I'm not sure if we can have multiple votes on multiple stories, I'm not sure the Forum's programming will allow it.

It'd be neat though to be able to have each person read through the stories and then allocate the three they liked best, and then set up a point system... Say... a BEST Story rating giving it 5 points, a SECOND best rating giving it 3 points and a THIRD best rating just 1 point. Then we can just add the points up at the end of the contest. I think that'd be neat, but I don't think the forum can handle it, so it'll probably just have to be "one registered person = one vote for the best story".


Why not? Cash is one of the best motivators and it's something that would clearly show our gratitude to the writer. Besides, we really haven't finalized anything yet, so why worry?


Cool, have him post it. Everyone else is free to post their ideas too. Something different if this one doesn't suit your tastes.


Hey that's cool, Jolen posted a note about this at the Process Forum! Whee! But, I don't understand, what other idea? I haven't seen anything else yet.


Well, see, since this IS the year end contest, and contests in general have been, ummmm, lacking in content, I thought we'd burn up what we had for donations and empty out the petty funds jar. There's not much in there anyway. Next year, I'd rather like to NOT do any contests again until 2010 nears to the end, and by then we can start the drive over again. Less for us to worry about, see? Especially if paypal or whoever is holding our funds decides to put a "non-usage of account fee" on the account and make a grab for the money donated to us.

I'll nominate this one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJdFJE_aQFY

which was made for Kitsune Kits Valentines Day contest in 2009

Well, today is October 16th. I checked the status of things last night before I checked out for the night.

I count 7 people who are interested in the contest:
Myself
Vidar, who said he'd be willing to create some banners
SSJ3MewTwo
Shapeshifter
Newslinx, with his surprising, yet oddly entertaining, pre-contest nomination.
Jolem, who was kind enough to post the contest idea over at the Process forums, both in the TF secton and the TG section. Most people there seemed content to complain about the lack of good TG material recently and made no comment regarding the contest idea.
LostDuskofHope, a poster at the Process.

The contest post on this forum got less than 60 hits (I was the 1st hit when I posted the idea on the morning of the 6th, and the 60th the night of Oct. 15th.)

To put this in perspective, http://doc.tf-media.net, the Website, gets a rough average of 1600 UNIQUE hits PER DAY, while the http://www.thelabforum.com, this Forum, gets roughly 1400 PER DAY.

My first post was the 6th, today is the 16th. So the Website has recieved 16,000 visitors in that time, the Forum 14,000 (rough math).

88% of people who visit the Website also visit the Forum.
Less than 1 person in 200 are interested in the contest idea (again, rough math)

I... Well, I honestly don't see that there's enough interest in the contest to even bother holding it. This, and the last few rather dismal attempts at contests make me think that we shouldn't bother holding contests any more.

I want to thank everyone who weighed in on this idea for the support you've shown us. Thank you very much.