Anyone who frequents Lenzr in August 2010 will notice there are some new developments, in addition to four new photo contests.

The photography challenges end October 1st, 2010 and there’ll be a whole lot more good information about them on this blog in the immediate future. The changes to the voting protocols on the website are permanent.

The new Lenzr voting protocol promises to level the playing field and ramp up the excitement.  Now each photographer’s pictures will be on display only, until there are just ten days left in the contest. When the countdown ends, the time to vote begins! This upgrade should make each contest 2x more exciting, and 100% more fair.

In the past we’ve  had problems keeping the contests fair.  Lenzr is still evolving and we discovered over time that the contests were set up to favour early adopters. Users that were the first to upload pictures always had a much better chance of winning because of the volume of members and voting visitors that saw their pictures first and any vote no matter how small helps each photo.

This idea for a countdown mechanism came to  us from a member that emailed suggestions to help improve the overall Lenzr user experience.  Fortunately, when we hear a good idea we jump on it – six months later!  This update is long overdue but is expected to radically improve the overall fairness of the competition, and the overall user experience.

Lenzr hopes to create a photography competition that is fair and equal for everyone involved. There is no question that the best photo should win, but quality is subjective – what might be considered beautiful by some users may be hideously ugly and unprofessional to others. So its only when we can poll the masses and take the mean averages that admiration can be properly quantified to determine the preferences of the voting population.

INSIGHT – in the next upgrade there will be a coupon distribution mechanism added to incentivize Lenzr members to vote on images.