Breakout topic for discussing the monthly art challenge format and rules

[steve.improvthis]

@Michelist
When I see how productive some users are here, and with just under ⅔ of the challenge time elapsed, I wonder whether the restriction of only being allowed to submit three images is a painful limitation for some.

Yes! And…
Sure, some topics really have me feeling creative, and I have no shortage of ideas. Plus, we all know a good way to improve our skills is to pick up the stylus and draw something every day. A challenge is a fine way to inspire that growth, and more submissions = more growth! The 3 limit helps me focus on what I feel is working and spend the time to move those 3 past the doodle stage. Limiting myself to 3 allows me about a week to work on each during the submissions window.

@Elixiah

@Michelist Agreed! But I also feel the need to enter each submission separately, since you never know which one people liked the most, or got the most votes when they are submitted as a group.

I’ve been thinking on splitting up the voting and making it one vote per picture as compared to per artist.

On the one hand, @Elixiah has a good point. Last month, for example, I have no idea if people voted for my submission of Ginger, the ornament, or both. And ya, it’d be nice to have known how those 21 people voting for me would have played out ‘cuse I have my favorite. But…

Let’s say folks liked both as ‘best of the month’. If we vote for best of the month as a picture rather than as an artist portfolio then they would need to cast their two votes as 21 for Ginger and 21 for the ornament. That would have in effect taken away their other vote from recognizing the great work everyone else did in December’s challenge. That doesn’t feel good to me.

On the other hand, let’s look at November’s voting. Let’s suppose the same number of total people voted for Elixiah’s Clock and Window Cat (16). But, now assume they were evenly split, only really liking one of those images as being their in the top two, and then they cast their other vote for someone else. Elixiah’s images would have each received 8 votes and, if all stays the same,@edgarej’s image would have received 12 votes making that the month’s top vote getter. Maybe it feels fair that the best image wins rather than the best portfolio winning, but I see a catch…

Let’s assume some people submit with the motivation of ‘winning the contest’. Right now, An artist gets a vote even if only 1 of 3 images submitted is in someone’s top ‘two best of the month’. This rewards multiple submissions and taking artistic chances that may appeal to only a subset of voters. If we move to one vote per submission, it’s less likely an artist who takes chances and submits more pieces would ‘win’ because their portfolio votes could end up spread out across their submissions.

So, splitting the votes could have the effect of some folks submitting fewer images which are competing for the same number of limited number of votes. The logical choice is to submit only the most crowd pleasing image (i.e. a cat, as @Corentin would have us believe… and, well, the last two months do play in to that theory ). That way, your votes don’t get diluted by submitting another piece that may pull a few votes.

While that may be a ‘winning strategy’, I don’t feel that is the direction we should go. I’m worried it would have a chilling effect on creativity and folks taking fewer artistic chances in the challenge.

A way around this is to have the votes for each piece sum up to the artist portfolio level. This way we can see the votes for each submission and the poll remains as a total of an artist’s votes across all the images they submitted. If it’s even possible, I’m guessing this would make declaring a winner a manual process and even more work for @sooz who already does a lot for the monthly challenge. The idea of volun-told-ing more work for sooz… feels bad.

Do y’all feel the juice of voting per image is worth the squeeze?

• Nope. Change Nothin’
• Yes. One Piece, One Vote
• Make sooz work! - Sum One piece One vote to the Artist level

IMHO: I agree with Elixiah, it would be nice to know how each of my submissions is individually received! And, while it is nice to be recognized when I post something really cool, winning is not my main goal in doing the challenge (and I get the feeling many in this community feel the same way). I’d rather folks have the option to submit 3 pieces, if they feel they have the time, and we vote per piece that rolls up to declare a portfolio winner… but I’m not wanting to add more to sooz’s plate. As a second choice, we change nothing and keep portfolio voting. I’m thinking this way helps get more folks really playing around in Krita, submitting more creative/polished works, and seeing all the cool things Krita can do… leading to more people supporting this software and the Krita community as a whole.

And mods… maybe this should be moved over to the feedback forum?

[Michelist]

Oops, if only I could have known what my joking remark would unleash from within the walls of this building called “Monthly Art Challenge” and what profound questions would arise from the dust of this now seemingly collapsing building that I kicked in with my joke - I wouldn’t have asked!

But okay, I did it! So …
For my taste, it would be better if we could vote on single pictures than on a collection of X pictures if an artist enters the voting-race with more than a picture.
The reason to collect all pictures in one posting may have been to get a better oversight for @sooz when it comes to check if someone may have entered more pics than allowed, I don’t know, so this is a question for her.
Unfortunately, at least for my knowledge of its manual, the Discourse forum software offers us users only the ability to edit the own postings, add or remove content to/from a post, but it does not allow editing the sequence of multiple postings in a topic, which would allow the users to group the own entries but leaving them single postings. For the “Monthly Art Challenge” this would be nice, but this is not a feature you want to have in a forum because if there are “funny users”, they may begin to change the meaning of a discussion if they could sort their postings. So, don’t ask, it is more than unlikely that such a plugin exists.

But I just see @sooz writing, let’s see what she has to say on/about it.

Michelist

[sooz]

Hi @steve.improvthis

Good points, all of them. It’s funny that this should come up this month because lately I started wondering what it would be like to vote on individual pieces rather than a grouping.

@raghukamath was already running this when I joined so I’m not sure what the thinking was. Possibly it’s to encourage “best effort” images – in other words, the limitation of 3 might funnel more finely finished work if submitters have extra time to commit.

Our voting system is quite limited (and yes, 100% manual and clunky) so if there were a change made to vote for individual images, I would ask that we allow the system to determine the winning image by % (the way it does now) and not add any manual clubbing of votes to determine overall portfolio score.

We can move this over to the feedback thread if you like.

[edgarej]

I vote for “one piece, one vote” but I actually did not vote in the poll above. For me, it boils down to how much more work it is for @sooz and admins.

@sooz is it more work for you to do the challenge as “one piece, one vote?”

I know you already replied but I just wanted further clarification because my brain is tired right now and couldn’t decipher if your statement reflects more work doing the challenge this way.

[sooz]

No, it’s not more work. It would require slightly more individual submission entries but then I would not have to scour the submissions topic to look for submissions that were not grouped into one reply.

thank you for asking

[Takiro]

It has been a few years but I believe the reason we limited the submissions to 3 was to make it fair for artists who don’t have so much spare time to paint and draw and were not able to compete with the output of some other users in terms of quantity. The reason we limited voting to artist instead of artwork was to prevent artist from “cannibalizing” their own votes i.e. their shared works would get 10 votes on each while in total it would be 30 and therefore could lose despite having more votes in total. However when we are looking for artwork of the month instead for artist, then it would still make total sense to vote for the artworks instead of artists and it would balance out when someone can only post one artwork since in theory there is not much benefit to post more than one (other than to maybe get lucky with people’s taste).

Discourse’s voting system also had limitations on how many entries can be in a poll which was another factor to limit artworks and made votes on artists instead of individual works.

[Michelist]

@Takiro

The reason we limited voting to artist instead of artwork was to prevent artist from “cannibalizing” their own votes i.e. their shared works would get 10 votes on each while in total it would be 30 and therefore could lose despite having more votes in total.

But that’s exactly what the current discussion is about: users who publish more pictures would rather see which of their works received the most votes and thus may even have won the overall ranking, rather than receiving a cumulative result. As long as someone only cannibalizing themselves, then no other is harmed, and the user does it by will. And, in my opinion, this is probably also fairer for those who have only submitted one entry, because if someone wins because the user has received 10 votes three times, then all images that received 11 to 29 votes have been cheated out of their place by images that received fewer votes.

Michelist

[Takiro]

Yes, that’s exactly my point. Vote per work instead per artist would be more fair.

[steve.improvthis]

@Michelist

probably also fairer for those who have only submitted one entry

Yes, perhaps it is better for people looking to “win” the creative challenge. However, my main point in all that above is that this may encourage folks to submit fewer entries, or even just one. I feel that is not what’s best for the challenge and the Krita community on the whole looses out.

[Takiro]

I don’t think that artists who don’t really care about winning would suddenly change their mind and submit less artworks, when they didn’t even mind in the first place.

[Michelist]

Oops, then these users would have a completely different understanding of this challenge than I do (which is probably why I overlooked the possibility), and here I hope they act as @Takiro just said.

Actually you’re right, when I think about it, there are people like that, of course this “type” exists. I just try to avoid them in my private life, which probably is why I overlooked this.

Let’s stay with @Takiro’s sight of things and pretend them being the absolute minority in this forum. Please!

Michelist

[Corentin]

Whatever the voting system is, won’t really change anything for me because I usually only submit 1 or 2 (at most) entries, and I came here not to win but because people choosing a theme for me helps with practising despite my chronic indecisiveness!

However I thought of 1 argument in favor of 1 vote per entry: with the current system, when the winner is someone who submitted more than 1 painting, it’s not really clear which one will be displayed in the featured row. If the vote is per entry, that will be a clear choice.

[edgarej]

This is my reason for voting 1 vote per 1 piece. If I ever submit more than one artwork (it’s only happened once or twice before), I would not know which piece is the winning piece. I didn’t even realize the unbalanced nature of having multiple pieces until steve mentioned it.

as for people submitting less, i actually don’t think that would be the case.

[sooz]

We are going to go ahead and change the poll so that we’re voting on individual images rather than clubbing multiple images together as a single voting choice.

The maximum number of submissions will remain at 3.

So if anyone already has multiple submissions in a single post, you can separate them into individual posts or I’ll separate them out when I build the poll. Also, I’ll change the rules section and send out a quick forum-wide note.

Thanks for this! It’s a great change.

EDIT: here’s the announcement: Change to Monthly Art Challenge Rules

[Mythmaker]

I’m really struggling to keep up with the site of late…

Anyway - The poll didn’t accommodate my preference so I voted no change.

I’ve become accustomed to the current system, but I still lean towards one entry per person. That’s not just because it serves my own habits - it just seems fairer to me on balance.

Another reason is I feel it encourages people to put more effort into a single piece rather than rushing to get multiple entries in.

It doesn’t mean people can’t tackle multiple ideas, just they need to choose a favourite for the vote.

Aside from my preferences I have a technical concern with this change to an individual image vote; Due to the low number of people who participate in the voting, I expect it will spread the tally out more thinly and result in more frequent ties (like the monthly feature voting).

It might mean less votes available for those further down the ranks too, so more people with low or 0%. (But hey - at least the more accomplished among us get to have our egos stroked further so that’s okay… )

Well - there was one other suggestion I think I’ve mentioned once or twice in the past, but not sure it’s technically possible; That we have a tiered vote to determine our order of preference and assign points accordingly. E.g. We can choose our 1st, 2nd and 3rd choices with varying points for each.

I think that would help separate the vote out, but would also add complexity which might be counter productive when it comes to people participating in the vote.

[sooz]

@Mythmaker

have a tiered vote to determine our order of preference and assign points accordingly. E.g. We can choose our 1st, 2nd and 3rd choices with varying points for each.

Do you have a way to do this that we could look at? I’m only familiar with the Discourse poll which is pretty limited. Or point me to a website. I don’t mind doing a little research.

[steve.improvthis]

@Mythmaker

have a tiered vote to determine our order of preference and assign points accordingly.

Ok @Mythmaker. Yes. Changing our voting from select many to a tiered set-up? Yup, that was a failure of imagination for me to miss this option.

I’d think that ranking our votes seems like a good way to mitigate the possibility for ties and at the same time accounts for multiple entries. A ‘Ranked Order’ poll where we select our top 3 or 4 entries seems like a good idea to me. And doubling the number of ‘votes’ to 4 would hopefully cut down on the number of folks receiving a 0% in the poll.

After a bit of digging @sooz, I found a discourse post that says these polls are sorta available in discourse, and it seems to be a relatively new feature. The author of this post (merefield) says they can be built as an Instant Runoff using his plugin. ( Creating and managing polls - #117 by merefield - Using Discourse - Discourse Meta ).

A few other posts I saw showed that this could also be used as ‘ranked order’ poll that would better fit our needs. I don’t think we need a full Instant Runoff since we don’t need multiple rounds of voting to determine a true winner with a majority of the votes… Or… dooooo we? Muh huh ha!. Ummm. No. No we don’t.

Maybe someone with more Discourse knowledge can look into this and see if we could get a Ranked Poll up and running? That’s way outside my abilities.

[Mythmaker]

@sooz

Do you have a way to do this that we could look at?

Unfortunately not - this is where my ideas often run aground; I can conceptualise solutions but lack the technical expertise to implement them or know what’s possible within the constraints of the system.

@steve.improvthis That looks interesting, though as above I can’t comment on the technical side!

[edgarej]

@Mythmaker

It might mean less votes available for those further down the ranks too, so more people with low or 0%. (But hey - at least the more accomplished among us get to have our egos stroked further so that’s okay… )

I have thought of this one before too. I don’t want beginners to feel disheartened if they are competing against really good artists. I always view the monthly challenge as a good form of exercise… not necessarily to win. I hope they view it this way too.

[sooz]

Hi @steve.improvthis

I read the entire thread and there’s no link to a ranked choice poll. The link in the reply leads to a description of instant runoff polling but no plugin.

I looked through the official Discourse polls that are included in the various Discourse packages and then I went through the gitlab directory of user-provided plugins and I still don’t see it.

Maybe I missed something…