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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BackdoorArts" data-source="post: 545148" data-attributes="member: 9240">Is there an opportunity?  Sure.  My post here was not meant to disparage anything that happens here nor belittle anything that's already in place.  But since you asked, yes, there's a weekly and even a monthly photo challenge here, and yes, they provide much the same opportunity from a shooting perspective.  If you're looking for simply someone to give you something to shoot during the week then this is more than you need.But from a challenge perspective I think the structure around the contests here is sorely lacking, and it's something I voiced when they were reintroduced.  I struggle with two things, which I recognize are inherent to the way this forum is structured and cannot be solved without investing time, energy, and potentially funds into software modifications, but it is because others may struggle with them that I offer the alternative.  First, there is a complete lack of anonymity in the submission of the entries.  In any juried contest this is critical.  We may like to think that we don't play favorites or that we can look at a photo independent of the name, but on a forum like this it's hard to see a photo next to a name that you've had experiences - good and/or bad - and not have that connection color your response to it even a little.  The challenges here are far closer to what you'd get from your local photo club, though even they manage to preserve some level of anonymity during the showing. To fix this photographers would need to have a mechanism by which to submit their photos to a thread where they can be displayed without attribution with only the people behind the curtain knowing who's who.  Which brings me to my second issue, the voting process and the timing around it.  The two step process here fails for two reasons:1) The early bird gets the worm. A photo submitted within 24 hours has more time to gather more "likes" and move on to the finals than one submitted with an hour to go, even though the photo submitted at the last minute may be a far better photograph that was conceived and executed across the entire 7 day period (waiting for the right light/weather/person, editing time, etc.).  It's a photography challenge, not a speed challenge, and when you have folks saying things like, "I really don't have all that much time to shoot", the early bird phenomenon is just one more reason not to.2) Not everyone gets to be a part of the final tally. Sure, in the end people only really care about who "wins", but if you take the time to play then you really want to know how you stacked up, not just that you didn't make the finals.  At least I do.  It's not about who I "beat" or "lost to", it's about how my work is perceived across the breadth of the work submitted, allowing me to assess what others perceived as "better" and decide whether that is simply a matter of taste or a deficiency in my photography that needs work.Again, having been involved in the early discussion back in 2014 for bringing the challenges back I understand that these two things mean a lot of work, and I suspect that for this site it's unnecessary.  What you/we have here is a great enthusiast site, but it's limited both in its scope (Nikon users) and setup.  What you do here is great, and the challenges are fine, but they lack what I want in a weekly challenge site - and that's probably as it should be.  You want it all then you have something like 500px or Viewbug or 1x, which I personally have problems figuring out sometimes (is it a photo sharing site? a contest site? a social site?).I repeat, my intention in sharing this link was not to condemn what's here but to offer those who want something more another place to participate in.  As I said, the forum/social aspect there is nothing like here, so it should do nothing to diminish participation in this site - if it had that potential I wouldn't have posted.  There are other sites I participate in that are much heavier in that respect and for that reason I keep them to myself.And I acknowledge I may have misstated specifics about how the challenges here are run.  I claim ignorance, but I am only attempting to lay out perspective and not make specific arguments.  These were the guidelines as I understood them over a year ago when I last participated in the challenges and if they have changed in some ways I acknowledge that - I did perform a cursory glance through them beforehand and did not see an significant change so please, there's no need to poke holes in my statements for minor factual errors.</blockquote>

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