What up 6P? We had a lot of killer articles last month, and competition was stiff, but there was one person in particular that ran away with the writer of the month title…
1st – Mark Hanson @ +67
2nd – Innocent_Shine @ +37
3rd – Anders @ +26
4th – Rahul Reddy @ +25
5th – Andrew Wamboldt @ +20
T-6th – Kenny Wisdom @ +18
T-6th – Myles O’Neill @ +18
8th – a hahn @ +17
9th – Chance Nauman @ +14
10th – Carl Scheu @ +13
11th – Oddjob @ +12
T-12th – Aron J. Wright @ +11
T-12th – Oscar Morales @ +11
T-12th – Ruben Cisca @ +11
15th – Roarkiller @ +10
16th – Stephan Blake @ +9
Incredible work by Mark, and great stuff from everyone else too! The final tallies were pretty tight (aside from the top few spots) and I’m definitely liking this new system better than the old one. The scores seem pretty accurate to me, and everyone really earned their +1s.
Since we’ve switched up the voting system, there is one lingering thing that still needs to be addressed. In the past, I gave the top X number of writers for the month a free 1 month Underground subscription. This worked ok, but what I’m doing now is just giving EVERYONE who writes an article that month the free UG access.
However, I’m now starting to give people their free subscription immediately after I edit their articles. There isn’t much point to making you wait when I’m going to reward everyone who writes, regardless of your placement. Originally I made people wait since the end-of-the-month poll determined who would actually get the subscriptions, but we’re no longer using that system.
This creates the conundrum though of does every single article you submit net you a 1 month free UG subscription, or can you only rack up so many per month?
The Solution
What I’m tentatively thinking right now if that if you have a current free subscription and submit a new article, I can tack on the additional free month you’ve earned on to the end, but past I will only add maybe 1 extra week for each additional article until you have less than 30 days of free UG membership remaining.
The reasoning behind that is I want to encourage people to write a good article each month (and not just a lot one month and stop once they’ve stockpiled UG subscriptions). At the same time, I want to reward people who do write more than one article every 30 days. It’s the quality over quantity thing.
flashlafayette.orgI would think about using the final scores to determine this kind of stuff, but I don’t want people creating accounts for their cats and dogs to get freebies. The scoring is pretty legitimate as is, and I don’t want to mess with it.
If you have any suggestions, please let me know! I’m all ears.
Good luck to everyone going to Regionals next weekend, and be sure to say hi to me if you’ll be in Philly! I’m on door duty and helping with registration, so you’ll probably see me first thing.
-Adam
P.S. Be sure the check out Mark’s YouTube channel. He’s pretty funny.
Hmmmmmmm . . . .
So . . .
If you write an article you get a free month of 6P UG. No matter how brilliant (eg: Myles’ sEX Corners) or how appalling (eg: name withheld to protect the guilty)?
Doesn’t seem like a good way of motivating people to produce quality, Adam.
First we lose our votes for WOTM, now we lose the chance to reward writers by clicking the Like button. I know 6P isn’t a democracy, but this makes it feel a lot less interactive and therefore less involving.
The Joltik article was already “good enough” to get an UG subscription, so honestly you never really had to try to begin with.
Quality over quantity? I can’t really think of a non-mean way to say this but the top writer is the person that basically churned out an article every other day…
The writers who score well get rewarded with bragging rights and potential opportunities to write for Underground. You’re also helping other readers out by rating the articles, so they know which articles are best to read.
I appreciate anyone that takes the time to write an article and I want to reward them. They’ve made a contribution to the community, and I believe the more you give, the more you get. They’ve given something to 6P, and I want to give back, and hopefully there will be proportional reciprocation over time.
Obviously some articles are better than others, and I’m trying to do a better job being stricter on who I allow to write.
If you have any actual suggestions, let me know.
If higher scores can lead to opportunities to write for UG, then I think that’s fair enough.
Do I have actual suggestions? I can try ;)
I do think an average score per article would be a fairer way of doing WOTM (or maybe take the cumulative score from the best two to reward those who write more often without hurting people who put a lot of effort into one or two articles).
As for how to reward them, how about a custom title on the forums, or something added to their writer’s profile? ‘Two time Writer of the Month’ . . . something like that?
Taking the score of the top 2 articles is a pretty good idea; I like that better than doing just an average. It still rewards the writers who write extra articles, but doesn’t kill the people who only write 1 article. Good thinking! We might end up doing that.
As far as the custom titles go, anyone can edit their titles on the forums, so it wouldn’t really be that special. I do keep track of all the winners here: https://sixprizes.com/writers-of-the-month/
And the top 3 people for the month are listed in the right sidebar (below the ad and newsletter signup box) plus on the homepage the top 10 or so people are listed under “Featured Writers.”
One thing I would disagree with on taking an average of the top 2 is that it means if someone has a very successful article, they wouldn’t want to write another that month lest they bring down their average rating.
Say I wrote one article and it got +30. That’s pretty solid and I would have an average of +30 for my articles. Under that system, I might be a shoe-in for WotM with that alone. If I wrote another, even if it got +12 or something, that still lowers my average to 21. Suddenly my position isn’t so solid.
So I’d say if you wanted to take the top 2 articles and average them for each writer, that would be a decent system. But I would add that writing a single article in a month should be averaged as if it were 2 articles (i.e. my one +30 would be worth a +15 average). That way a writer who had one successful article at least has motivation to write a second article that month. It also should encourage more than just 2 articles, since you can try to improve upon your worse article’s score to bring up your average.
It would definitely be cumulative rather than an average, and probably either your top 2 or 3 articles. I totally agree about using averages being unfair; not sure if I communicated that clearly enough!
If the WotM were given a chance to write a UG article (still subject to quality control) then I think that could be good motivation.
Other than that, I think maybe only awarding top 10 or top 8 free UG subscriptions might make it more fair in terms of quality vs. reward. After all, if writing 2 articles with a +3 rating versus writing 2 articles with an average of a +15 rating leads to both writers getting UG membership, then what’s the point of trying to write a good article from the standpoint of someone looking for a UG membership?
The current system rewards writers who want to contribute more often. That’s definitely a good thing and I think it works just fine. This does suggest that someone should try to pump out articles rather than spend time working on only submitting their best. However, I won WotM by writing 5 articles in one month, true, but 2 of my articles alone were highly rated enough to beat out 2nd place. Thus I don’t think the current system is really benefitting the overactive writers too too much.
If anything, you could limit people to only a specific number of articles per month. I know that seems counter-intuitive, but I don’t think it would be that terrible. You’d also enforce people to only publish what they feel is the best of their articles. I think 5 is a good max number, but that could be up for review. There are just over 4 weeks in every month, so that averages to just over 1 article per week allowed for review.
i.e.
Giving out UG memberships just for writing articles. By making it competitive, people will be encouraged to write and submit only quality articles. I would recommend top 10 writers get UG membership.
I also can imagine that by using the like system, you could encourage people to cheat a bit by creating dummy accounts, or asking friends to uprate them. But the same could be said of the old system couldn’t it? Unless you established a voting council or something, people could just vote for themselves with multiple accounts. I dunno how the old system worked though.
I also like baby_mario’s suggestion of a forum title or something. Some form of permanent recognition would be pretty cool and good motivation :P It could even be a little badge on the front page next to your name or something on your profile.
One of the reasons I didn’t mention why I want to give anyone who gets an article published a free UG membership is because I can then give it to them immediately, instead of making them wait up to a month until they get it.
I realize that it must be annoying to get an article published and know it’s good, but then have to wait a few weeks until you get UG access. I want to give a more immediate reward.
The ratings are tricky to work with when determining stuff since they can be easily manipulated. I feel like by putting less on the line with the ratings, they become a lot more accurate and helpful for determining which articles are best. Like you definitely earned the top spot last month, and you can be proud of that.
In the past, the polls were manipulated. The Purple Pro had everyone in his family voting for him, which was unfair. Kenny Wisdom won at times I’m sure because he told people to vote for him (which is ok and shows hustle, but not everyone has a bunch of close friends like him, so it’s not totally fair or representative of who was the best). I’m sure other people have done that too.
So I don’t want to put too much emphasis on the likes in order to try and make it more accurate, if that makes sense.
I like the badge idea, I’ll try to think of something along those lines.
genius idea Adam
Congrats, Crawdaunt! It was fun reading your articles throughout the month. :)
Rather than cumulative, how about just using the best rated article per person, and only top XX people gets the reward? It pushes for both quality AND quantity, as writers have to write good articles, and if it isn’t good enough, they can at least try again in the same month.
Not really. If you write one article and it gets a high rating, why write another? The highest rated articles are sort of a lottery. What’s the difference between someone whose article is rated +30 and someone whose article is rated +32? If nothing more, the difference is probably the time either article has been up.
Is this all we have to do? An article, is that an essay or at least a paragraph?