Long Overdue Update From Lenzr Admin
Fingers crossed everyone, Lenzr usually gets real exciting when there is just ten days left in each contest, because when the countdown ends, the voting begins! At 12:01 am Monday Dec 20th, 2010 the flood gates open and Lenzr will begin collecting human participation in the form of votes and comments. Please remember there are two types of votes. As near as I can figure the unregistered visitor’s vote is worth about 86% less than a registered member’s vote.
Broken Factories photo contest has twenty six images to chose from, and Canadian Beaches photo contest has over fifty images in the queue. Making it Beautiful has approx thirty good pictures. When viewed sequentially, each contest tells a story - they reflect all aspects of a subject theme.
Lenzr has a slightly different perspective on photo contests; on this website the picture galleries grow and are presented as an interactive slide-show to the voters. Each contest is a unique story with a beginning, middle and eventually an end – a happy ending for someone. Every day there is a little bit more recorded and the stories grow image by image, vote by vote.
Who will win?
With almost one hundred images in these three galleries it’s hard to say which is the best and which is ‘sure to win’. Indeed there are still more pictures being uploaded every day. Who are all these photographers? They’re not the usual suspects.
Later today, Lenzr admin will be deleting all photos that don’t match each photo contest’s criteria. MAKING IT BEAUTIFUL for example clearly stipulates that the photos must have a subject, somebody or something must be visible actually making something beautiful. Unfortunately a lot of submissions do not have this requirement, and rather than delete them from the index as they were uploaded, I have again opted to do one surgical strike and cleanse the board immediately before voting begins.
If your photo was deleted…
It was because it didn’t have a subject, a human or animal or extreterrestrial actually making something beautiful as per the contest requirements. Sadly some of the prettiest pictures were deleted. There was close-ups of plants and human haircuts and one shot in particular showed the back of a woman’s head, her hair tied together with a floral bow. It’s worth noting that this is probably exactly the type of content that would most please this particular contest sponsor; Aveda Institute hopes to become more widely known as high quality hair school.
More Photo Contests in February
In February 2011 there will be more photo contests, a lot more. These challenges will run 60 days until April 1st, 2011. At that time something totally amazing will happen – a brand new Lenzr 2.0 will launch in Canada.
Let there be Judges
The February photo contests will be judged by other famous photographers, notable friends of Lenzr, Canadian celebrities, camera store owners, club presidents, and glitterati along with that contest’s individual sponsor – the judges will be listed in the contest descriptions. Collectively the body will decide which of the top ten photos submitted to the competition is the best image, as per the criteria stipulated in the contest description.
Lenzr Lovers don’t Cheat.
Once again Lenzr is poised to watch the scores and protect the people who respect the system. With the introduction of Judges next round its hoped the quality of the submitted images will improved, as will of course the winning image. Its also hoped the drive to cheat and be number one will also be diminished.
Over the holidays our staff is on guard to help safeguard healthy competition, and this time we have even better tools, and smarter proxy IP blockers. In the last twenty days we’ve moved the website to a dedicated server and have built even more impressive additions to our firewall. These improvements should really frustrate cheaters. Now it will be real hard to use a proxy IP websites to get fresh votes, and all phoney email address providers have also been blocked. In addition to the firewall security upgrades, we also have sophisticated scanner set to report shady behavior. In the unlikely event that cheating does occur, the perpetrator’s voting patterns, destination address, source information, technical interface relationship data and even more information can be gleaned and scrutinized.
So let’s go over some FAQs about the rules again…
What is Allowed?
Telling your friends to come and vote for your photo is absolutely allowed. Telling them to vote unregistered and then register as members to vote again is allowed. Voting for yourself from another computer is allowed. But using the same PC routed through a 3rd party network or conduit is not allowed and will be blocked / detected. Using mobile phones to visit and vote from many locations is undesirable, immoral, and kinda scary cause we don’t know how effective we can be stopping that just yet. I want someone to write me or tell me in the comments how to stop that. What value are comments in Lenzr scoring? Comments used to have real value in the Lenzr vote algorithm, now they have less weight, but they do serve to show administrators that the member has real friends who like the picture.
Is Lenzr just a popularity contest?
Yes right now and for the last time this photo contest website could be described as an image driven social media popularity contest – the prize winner will probably have the most friends, and indeed have the strongest loyalty among friends. This in itself is rather honourable, but ultimately we are building a user driven photo contest website and not friend collector reward program. We’ve got to bring it back to the pictures. That said we know what we have to do and are doing it – next contest sequence will have judges, and then a whole new ballgame will appear online in march 2011, fingers crossed.
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