Dragnix.Net

Dragnix Posting Contest

To create some activity to an otherwise dead forum I've decided to run a contest. The basic idea is simple, you get a point for having posted over the course of the day. You will not normally get more than one point per day, and the contest ends after a month.

Rules

1. Participation
Anyone who makes a post during the period of the contest is automatically in the contest. Members of the forum that does not want to participate can choose ignore all the buzz, and decline the offer to receive a prize if they win anything.

2. Duration of the contest
The contest starts at 2013-09-05 0:00 UTC and ends at 2013-10-04 23:59 UTC (this is 30 days). Posts made outside of this time period does not count in the scoring.

3. Scoring
The main scoring is one point per day of posting for a particular user. This scoring is called the daily points. Extra points are rewarded for creating popular topics.

3.1. Daily Points
This is the main scoring and the maximum achievable score is one point per day in the contest. It is calculated by choosing an hour boundary for days in the contest that will most benefit the user in question. More precisely the score is calculated in the following way:

1. The post times of all edglible post of the user to score is spread across the 30 day period of the contest.
2. A 24 hour border divides this period of time into 30 segments.
3. The segments with an eligible post is then counted.
4. The time period is rotated one hour such that the first hour from this is removed from the front and appended to the end. Resulting in all other hours to be shifted by one hour.
5. Step 2 to step 4 is repeated 24 times, so that every hour of the day has been used as a border.
6. The count from step 3 with the highest value is the daily score.

3.2. Extra Points
An extra point is awarded to the creator of a popular thread. A thread is popular when it has replies from at least 4 different users and has at least 10 replies. Only threads and post that are eligible are counted.

4. Non-Eligible Posts
Posts that fall under the following categories are excluded from the scoring.

• Tests posts, made for trying out a specific feature of the Message board
• Content less posts. Post with no real content to anyone.
• Forum games of the kind "do X with the post above you".
• Posts made with the clear intention of gaming the rules to get an unfair scoring. If you find a hole in the rules, please report it.

5. Prize Pool
After the end of the contest the participant with the highest score gets to choose a prize from the prize pool first. Then the participant with the second highest score gets to choose a prize from the prize pool. This continues until there are either no prizes left or all participants have had their chance to pick a prize. Prize pool submissions and claims are found here

Would this post count as a contentless post, or as a legitimate question?

DragonRider wrote:Would this post count as a contentless post, or as a legitimate question?

That's an excellent question. Given that I'll probably be the one to do the scoring, the scoring will be rather generous. Which means in your case that it'll count. The rule is there to avoid creating an incentive to flood the board with "me too!" style posts.

The scoring halfway through the contest is as follows:

1. asdf with 14 points
2. DragonRider with 13 points
3. Sivert3 with 13 points
4. BeneathTheStarlight36 with 9 points
5. Forgotten Dragon's Ire with 4 points
6. alondor with 1 point

Ugh, the rules don't define the ordering should two contestant have the same score. If we go by post count in the contest period, I will be ranked before DragonRider having 29 posts over 20.

Anyway, I recommend you to look over the scoring card yourself and verify that I've counted correctly according to the rules.

i can't open the file. my computer doesn't know what to do with .ods files. i tried OpenOffice, but that doesn't seem to work with it.

It's an OpenDocument spreadsheet. Made with OpenOffice. So you should be able to open it with OpenOffice. Have you tried to open it with OpenOffice calc?

that's strange. every time i tried to open it, the program would start up but the file itself wouldn't actually open. i'll try it again later.

@BeneathTheStarlight36: It might be because of the file being inside a compressed zip file. Have you tried to uncompress the file (i.e. drag it out of the zip folder) before opening it?

The contest is over
Thanks to everyone that has participated in this contest. And to the gracious donations to the prize pool. The final score is thus Congratulation to DragonRider who has given the greatest contribution to the community by being the most consistent and relevant poster here. asdf deserves an honorable mention, having a higher daily score, but falling short due to 2 extra points awarded to DragonRider. The prizes will be handed out in the Prize Pool thread

The extra points that have been given out is the following:

• 2 points to Sivert3 awarded for the "Dragonkin" and "Minecraft" threads*
• 2 points to DragonRider awarded for the "Roleplay call for ideas" and "Project Wikify" thread

*The "Dragnix Posting Contest - Prize Pool" thread has been exempted, as running a contest shall not give an unfair advantage

I encourage everyone to scrutinize the score card, as there is a possibility that I've made a mistake in my calculations. The scoring card is an OpenDocument Spreadsheet attached to this post in a zip file.

Some useless stats
Over the coarse of the contest a 162 post was posted. The most popular time of the day to post was 20:00 UTC (8 pm), and the most popular day to post on was Thursday oddly enough. And finally a diagram of who's been the most eager poster

Yay! Now, when I get my laptop on Thursday, time to install Steam...