Hello Peter,

You are always welcome.

Thank you for voicing your concerns here. We have taken note of the same.

The BFA Team

Hi Pauline & Joe,

As its a cash prize, I personally feel that the voting and the judging should be scrapped with just nominations being accepted and the 3 nominees with the most nominations to be sent to Bogdan to decide the winner, after all its his money!

Best Wishes

John.

Hello Everyone and BFA TEAM :-)

How lucky I was the notification for this forum being one of the first in my inbox when I opened up my yahoo! ... else who knows when I would have been  found it! (hm, yet again not sure of the correct form of the verb ... it always happens to me after a longer absence from here?! ... )

To keep it short and quick ... till I still have time to write it ... I consider OK the current way of deciding the winner! I mean - VOTING and JUDGING should be a good way!

What I think it should be more clear are the criterias the judges are using; I mean - for instance - if they point the VISUAL criteria, than it has to be the VISUAL and not - let me "quote" one of them:

"Forum started as fun and on topic with great graphics and posts.  There are a few posts that just simply do not belong in this forum"

this explanation has mostly few to do with VISUAL if none!

... and I could find others like this, but I very much hope my point came out and that is my purpose.

Establishing a few ... how should I call them (?!? hm??) - pointing criterias inside the criterias (I very much hope you will see what I mean) will make the judging more objective (as soon as voting is supposed to be more subjective) and thus things will be in a balance, and it will not allow to the judges to evaluate forums in contest upon the same old "friendship" or "I like you" or "now I punish you" or who knows what else based! ... besides thus they will have no choice but to really go over and brows around the specified forum to be able to give their marks! Some times I had the feeling they had no real idea what the forum in question was about or for! (sorry for my some what critical statements?! ... don't meant at all to hurt anyone's feelings, but these were mine)

Wishing you all the best, as this project is not an easy one, to keep it sano and sana, with friendship,
Anamaria
(lately always in a rush ... its a pity not for that so wellknown gold! LOL)

Hello BFA team!

Personally, I do not feel that we will ever get a really impartial judging... in my opinion, any judge will always be judging in accordance to his/her own taste if not pre-biased by a friend's forum or else... There is nothing we can do to prevent this from happening... even if the judges would be out from Adland!

So, in my opinion, the actual way of doing is quite good...
1) You have a first set of voting based on nominations that is naturally biased because you can nominate your own forum or one of a friend... with no concerns really about the quality of the forum;
2) Then, you have a voting process where all of the community is invited to come and vote on the nominated forums... here, as always, very fee people are getting involved in the process so that the few regular people coming in to vote are the ones who naturally influenced the results - either by their own taste or by their voting for a friend... I personally feel that in this contest as in other here in Adland or elsewhere, these contests are more popularity related than otherwise... so, if you are a very involved personality in Adland, you will get more vote or you will get to influence people in voting for you quite often and, I do not think that we can stop that from happening. By getting more people involved in the voting process, we could somehow dilute this popularity influence... so maybe, there could be a form of incentive for people to come and vote;
3) The actual judging process with 3 - the more impartial we can get - judges, is there to counterbalance the popularity wave somewhat of the voting process... naturally, a judge could give some more points to a forum that he/she likes best or a friend's forum but, there are also 2 other judges and the voting process that has already allotted a number of points... so, a sole judge can not really makes the balance change drastically unless its judging report becomes apparent favoritism...
So, overall, I do not really see how we can get a more fair way or process of evaluating the forums than what is in place now...
And, I feel that visual is certainly an important part of a great forum

All the Best,
Blessings,
Alain

Hi John,

very interesting proposal here, thank you, we the team would be thrilled if Bogdan would accept this. Imagine 3-4 hours of work setting up the winners thread  less for us...wow!!! that's just the setting up of the winner templates n scores, copy pasting each n every remark in the appropriate boxes...besides the Award of Appreciation, the nomination thread that has to go up at the same time whew!!  a good 4+ hours, and if the net is slow that day...God help us :-( !

Thank you for your input...greatly appreciated.

The BFA Team