As many of you are aware, we have made several changes to the winner selection process for abandoned contests. In fact, some of these changes have been too frequent. The intent for these changes has always been to make the winner selection process as fair as possible. However, we are finding that unless we remove SH team’s involvement from the subjective decision process, we will continue to have unhappy creatives who think their name should have been picked as winner. Our team receives several emails after every contest winner is announced, questioning why that name was selected, and not theirs. Frankly, there is no good answer because we know that most creatives submit very thoughtful entries in the contests, and many of them rightly feel disappointed when their entry is not selected. However, when our integrity and business ethics are questioned, then we know something is amiss. It has been suggested by few creatives, that we “favor” a select group of creatives in awarding prize for abandoned contests. It has also been suggested by some that we have “planted” fake creatives so that we can award the prize to them (and circumvent awarding the prize to real creatives).
We pride ourselves in running a transparent business that is built on a foundation of ethics, and trust. The only reason we have an extensive winner selection process for abandoned contests is because of our belief that all good entries should be considered, especially when the CH abandoned the contest before seeing or rating all submissions. However, this kind of involvement is leading to dissatisfaction among several creatives , that can only be addressed by removing the subjective element from this process. Therefore, we are announcing yet another set of changes to our winner selection process. However this time, these changes are going to stay because we have concluded that SH will not play any role in winner selection that is based upon a subjective criteria. You can read about the changes here:
With these simplified rules, we believe we can spend more of our time on finding ways to reduce the contest abandonment, and improving the feedback process between CH and creatives. We are also introducing more “check ins” with the CHs to continue to remind them about the importance of ratings and feedback. While everyone may not agree on how best to handle abandoned contests, we believe the more important aspect is to find ways to reduce contest abandonment, and we plan to focus much more on those aspects going forward.
Questions please…if the contest winnings get split,who will be credited with the win ? Also, does this mean there are no more best entries? If a CH abandons a contest early after like rating only 10 entries out of 800,does that mean too bad…the people with the early entries will win?
I will Yuck, welcome back nearly one hit wonders, hello 200 plus creatives entering contests now just to have a shot at the piece of the pie, Yuck Yuck and Yuck,
That said if Admin can have some foresight in some contests, where it seems things/sole top trender just aren’t kosher and bypass the auto-win and send that through to the algorithm , that would alleviate some Yuckiness,
But if they are choosing randomly from all entries in some cases…then it is common sense unless there are safeguards, that those who have more entries, would have more opportunities to win.
If I only entered 2 names into a contest, and you entered 20…then I would potentially the way I understand it, have only 2 chances in the mix,where you would have 20.
Example 2: A contest (with $100 award) received total of 600 entries. 0 entries received “Love It” ratings, 5 received “Like It” ratings.
by this example or lets say out of 30 Like it entries I only had subbed 2 names total both getting likes great I have 2 shots where as contestant b subs 25 names and gets 6 likes they now are in theory 3x more likely to get picked,
Thanks for the questions. I would like to address them here, but feel free to ask if you need any more clarification:
If the prize amount is split due to this process, it will not be counted as an actual “win” on any creative’s profile. Therefore, the profile will now reflect the actual wins as a result of a CH awarding the contest. We will keep a separate track of these contest awards, and they will factor as “tie breakers” for leaderboard. For example, if 2 creatives received 2 actual wins from CH, and one of them also received a split award on an abandoned contest, that creative will earn a higher rank in the leaderboard. We will also show these awards separately on the profile page.
There are no more best entries for Abandoned Contests. Only if a CH asks us to gather Best Entries so they can focus on a smaller list to pick a winner, would we send out Best Entry invitations.
We will no longer review the comments in deciding a winner. This is because, comments are subjective, and even if the CH said they liked the entry, they still did not find it strong enough to select it as a winner. Moreover, as stated earlier, SH will no longer bring any subjectivity into the process in order to make the winner selection process completely transparent.
If a contest has received no ratings, and we have to pick from the entire pool of creatives, it would not make a difference whether the person submitted 1 entry or 20 entries. Remember, we are not picking specific entries in this case - we are picking from the pool of creatives. Therefore, everyone will stand an equal chance irrespective of how many entries they entered.
In this example, each creative who received Like It ratings stands the same chance. So if there were 30 Like It ratings, but only 5 creatives who submitted those 30 entries, we will select 2 winners (or 4 in case of $200 contests) from the pool of 5 creatives.
We will pick from pool of creatives, not pool of entries in case of split awards. Therefore, higher number of entries will not increase their odds.
So then it’s not about how many entries you submitted overall, but how many entries you submitted before the CH got out of dodge that they also rated highly?
I agree with BeDaring. Selection will be randomly picked through creative names and not on the number of entries. Even if you have 100 love it entries it only represent 1(your name)for the draw unless you guys have multiple accounts LOL…SH is doing their best to be fair enough in awarding a winner. I like this new process. 1 Love it/Like it is the default winner.YUCK???Nah!!!
no 4 I like but I do foresee with that, a whole lot more creatives just entering contests in essence overwhelming the CH with an ungodly amount of names a lot probably with little thought, just for a shot if it does go un awarded,
No3 fantastic just in time ( Arghhhhhhh (just to clarify Most of my Arghhh is life in general not just SH life)
One thing I will chime in about is not being able to see the winning name… I always enjoy witnessing creatives’ efforts, even if the name wasn’t picked by the CH him/herself. Booo. What would even be the point in displaying who the winner is if you didn’t show the name also? So on the winner page it’ll just show the contest and the creative who won? Borrrrring.
I don’t like this at all I rarely win, but when I do, I want to know that I was chosen, whether it be by SH or the bot picking out of 10 of SHs favorites.
All of the above comments raise some serious concern! I forsee SH being hit with more negative emails than ever!
I usually like the changes made but I don’t support this one. I hope SH will reconsider!!!
Here’s an idea: how bout leave it the way it was except don’t reveal the winning name. You’ll still have people accusing SH of playing favorites but I feel like that’s part of the territory. But this way no one can give reason as to why their name was better.
I don’t think removing yourself from the equation solves the problem. Infact, I think it will cause more people to wonder why SH isn’t protecting the integrity of these contests and the time and effort the creatives put in.
At least when SH picks they can actually stand by the name knowing they support it.
Furthermore, I think a creative should be penalized somehow for questioning a win soley because they thought theirs was better! I mean I’ve been there several times but would never actually tell SH mine should have won. Who is doing this?? SMH For every person that likes your name there’s 10 more that don’t…I thought everyone old enough to participate understood this??? It does say in the rules the winner can’t be challenged so who are these people that think the rules don’t apply to them? Penalize them if they can’t respect the rules. That’ll stop them!!! Because now look where we’re at…just giving away wins with next to no purpose behind it
This is one of those catch 22’s. If you penalize people for complaining you set up an environment where people don’t feel like they can point out flaws in the system or fraudulent activity. On the other hand, if people feel like every loss can be aggressively argued because they earned that win dangummit then everybody is surly and SH’s integrity is constantly being questioned.
Haha… Chasity… you were much braver than me. Said everything I was thinking and more!!! 100% agree. Dan please reconsider removing SH completely from the selection process.
The whole “planting fake creatives” thing is pretty hilarious, though…
But seriously… REAL PERSON/PEOPLE over Squadbot, PLEASE!!!
We appreciate everyone’s feedback. We have given it a lot of thought, and have tried several different approaches, as you have probably witnessed over the last several months. However we have come to the conclusion, that SH can not and should not play the role of a CH, and we need to stay as an independent platform, where we are not applying any subjectivity or preferences towards any names. The contests are held between CH and the creatives, and our role is to make sure that they are run as fairly as possible so that the hard work of creatives is protected. Our role is also to make sure that most contest winners are selected by the CH, and we will work towards implementing even more processes which enable that. In cases where contests are still abandoned, we will respect the preferences made by the CH, and award winners only on the basis of those preferences by following an objective process that is outlined above.
We are willing to consider any feedback that further improves this process, as long as it does not involve SH team in decision making process for winner selection. For example, if the creatives feel the stats or leaderboard for these kind of contests need to be handled differently or how should these wins be shown in the winner board, we are open to any and all of those ideas.
Since the winning names won’t be displayed, does that mean we are able to use that name again? As an Example (just an example/scenario), if I submitted AdvantEdge.com and it was one of the loved names and my name and another name split the prize, but the names aren’t shown, would I be able to use AdvantEdge.com again? Or is that considered as a purchased domain name by the contest holder, transferring the intellectual property rights to them?
( Arghhhhhhh (just to clarify Most of my Arghhh is life in general not just SH life)
I rarely win, but when I do, I want to know that I was chosen, whether it be by SH or the bot picking out of 10 of SHs favorites.