That my friend… is exactley what we have been saying…
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[quote=“Kuanor, post:39, topic:25168”]
You stated your opinion several times here.
As have you, but i see no avalanche of supporters of your cause as you seem to think…
The reason i vote to close it is because everyone who has an opinion on the matter they wish to express has done so. Every vote or question I’ve seen/asked on this forum gets answers in the first few days and only views after.
This thread is turning into an endless discussion about some changes that werent even part of the original question.
I’m not against changes at all and neither are the other stsff members, not to contests, nor anywhere else. We do usually tend to go with what the majority wants. So far, unless I’ve missed stuff, only 2 members said they’d feel more comfortable with more restrictive rules. If everyone who replied was for it we’d have adopted it already.
If you want a final answer and lay the discussion to rest you are free to make a vote thread and have the community vote. This goes for every topic and everyone. Not even admins can meddle with the outcome of those, nor see who voted for what.
I just dont see the point of letting this go on as it turns into a 2 or 3 man “but what im saying is…” discussion and the rest of the community just ignoring the thread…
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I’m usually against ever closing threads. There has been a thread recently which I didn’t see until after it had already closed, so I couldn’t even add my input. There was a time when I could only visit this site once every few weeks, and this thread has only been up for a week. I don’t think a thread should be closed for going off-topic, that’s just natural in any conversation and pretty much exemplifies the internet.
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I’m counting the people who are following the structure of a discussion without getting overly nervous as my supporters. 
They usually even speak for themselves.
For example, people sharing their experience from former contests, what they expect and how they vote, is very helpful – at least to me when I am asking how to distinguish the different contest types if not by rules. I’m quite new here after all.
Contentwise, I think I have nothing to add for now.
And if I’m not mistaken, neither do you.
Mate… are you purposefully being an ass or just being you?
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Honestly, just being me.
You are a very direct type, I suppose. Let’s try to get along, not shove each other into boxes they don’t belong and not putting ourselves on a horse.
Hopefully everyone is spending as much time on the currently live and very exciting Golden Hat dootapalooza as we are wombling about in this thread.
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I support closing threads when they aren’t positive or constructive and polls - like the one we had about the fate of the furries - are an important tool for ending perceived debate.
They’re usually more relevant when they aren’t gonna be a landslide though…
We are unbelievably lucky to have @Admiral and the effort, energy and patience he puts into Golden Hat puts most of the rest of us to shame. The only people who can hold a candle to him in this community are the ones who do meaningful things like @Oxymandias, @MichaelX and @Loidrial who do things like create, maintain and promote great content, or code to transfer the entire archive to the new system.
Whatever they want to do, they should keep doing it, and if alternative ideas excite any particular individual, nothing prevents them from getting organised and doing whatever it is they want to do.
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Thank you for feedback folks. There are certainly many ways one could run contests, many of which could work fine. I picked up the CDO contest format as it was in 2014 and added a few small twists (such as notifying people that their entry had been received). CDO had long been a creative hotbed and the competitions had been an engine of community fun and great creations from the very start. In part, I picked up running contests because I had never done anything like it before, so I wanted to try out something new (I also picked up Word of Hashut, but making a webzine even with basic tools proved beyond me).
Experience made clear that we had some needlessly restrictive rules put in place, all of which had been installed out of a sense for fairness across the board (or for promoting a CD army book before Tamurkhan). But why should not this or that glorious entry be allowed in, just because a small regulatory wrinkle happened to be in the way? So most rule changes were about removing rules, and only a few added rules. Sure, the contests are contests with winners and prizes and glory, but what they really are about is encouraging creativity and community fun, with prizes as bait. It’s about exploiting the human competitive spirit for the sake of creativity. Regardless of who happens to harvest most votes, we always get to see a lot of lovely and clever creations. 
While I’m at the helm you can count with broad and open inclusive themes, no worries. Most people would probably run it more strictly than I do: When I hosted contests over on the Ninth Age, suggestions from members usually revolved around introducing more restrictive rules of some kind. I didn’t see the point of it. I tried to teach them the CDO way of running contests since it would fit T9A community like a hand in glove, and I stressed the lessons learnt about avoiding needless restrictions.
Feel free to lock the thread if you like: I’m content with feedback gathered since a while back now, and will check back in a year’s time in a new thread with poll to see how this experiment works out. Or else leave the thread open in case someone else stumbles across it later on and has a bright idea to add (be welcome to notifty me with an @ if so, since I’m not following after we got sufficient feedback from various angles).
The contests as we run them now works fine as far as I can see, and changes will naturally only be little tweaks.
Special thanks to @MichaelX for mentioning crafts: Of course handicraft projects should be part of hybrid themes! While it would be fun to have a dedicated crafts theme, and I’m sure people would enter, it might be better in the long run for crafts to be a permanent feature by going hybrid. Let’s try it out and see.
Running contests isn’t that time consuming. A lot is copy-paste from earlier stuff. At most an evening’s work for announcement (usually a lot quicker), an evening for entries in the voting thread, and a morning for winners thread, contacting winners and donors and updating contest galleries. Easily worth it when we have such a jolly community with so many brilliant and fun entries streaming in.
Cheers
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