@Anjy @AlwriteyThen @Commulinks Seems we've all been noticing that. I have been here since June and only sent one. I feel out of the loop a bit now. I don't send any because the discussions we've had before as well as to the rules of SH being that you shouldn't use messages to gain advantage and I honestly can hardly think of a way (except in the case of my one, or as thank yous or whatnot) that a PM to a CH about anything, even your own entry in some cases wouldn't give you an unfair advantage. With the ones I have noticed @Anjy, they seem to be ones that never leave comments on the actual contest either. I don't know. @RachelSH thank you for addressing this but I still am not encouraged by this. I know the 'monitoring' is just random and for all we know it only does one PM at random so it's hard to tell what all of these messages could be about and if they would lead to unfair advantage. As far as stats are concerned, I can still see it being used against people (even if it is rarely doesn't make it right) and yes transparency is important but only if the things that are transparent are accurate portrayals of information and easily understood in cases where it can be used against anyone and when it comes to stats -- neither is the case.
Edit to add: If transparency is something that is so important, there are other ways, as have been discussed in many occasions as to the stats on profile thing, that this information could be truncated and still remain transparent or if not that then making stats more accurate? I don't know. But just because it may not seem as being used often, you can't guarantee that it is not used and on top of that not used in an unfair, biased, uneducated way because those stats do not even represent our skill, knowledge, ability, etc. They represent how judgmental of a process naming can be, how other CHs can rate in an array of different ways,and just how much of our schedule we can or cant give up to this. In no other way are they complete portrayals of ability when we are going against 20-30 if not more creatives each and every contest and not all CHs know how to rate/give feedback and understand descriptive briefing and all the other things you can impose here. The starts are not correlations to ability and if transparency is a need then this FACT needs to be transparent as well.