# Reasons of "not voting"



## Faruk Gençöz (Nov 4, 2005)

We have 2 completed and 1 ongoing contests where the members could vote and determine the results by themselves. In the first contest (anubias photo) the winner photo could get 41 votes whereas in the second contest (inexpensive aquarium) the winner could get only 19! And finally we have the ongoing one ("Reds") in which there are two days left for voting and the most voted photo has got only 7 votes.

I will not say "Please, vote!" to the forum members who run for the 12,000th member and 200,000th post. Participating to the voting is simply dependent upon the preference of the members. And our members showed their preferences in the pattern I have summarized above. In spite of declining voting rate, the number of photo submissions to the contests seems to increase. 

I wonder why members do not prefer to vote. Is it because of lack of time, not worthy photos, no info regarding to how to vote, no info about the existence of the contests, the beliefs like "I like to look at them but do not want to vote", "one vote does not change anything", "contests are not the good way of interaction here", "contests are not fair" or "I don't want to hurt anyone"?


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## SnakeIce (May 9, 2005)

I find myself wondering, in the case of the anubius photo contest, if the contest is about the best picture or the best plants. Perhaps a small blurb occuring at the top of each page of photos of a particular contest that sums up the aims of the contest would help. I found that after looking at several pages of photos I forgot what it was I was voteing for.

The other thing that is affecting the numbers of voters is the choice factor. The most participation is obtained when there are 2-5 choices and drops off as more choices are added.


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## Faruk Gençöz (Nov 4, 2005)

Snakeice, would you suggest a pre-elimination of the contest submissions to reduce the options to 5 or something? How would the elimination take place? By a jury?


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## hooha (Apr 21, 2005)

I just voted. One reason - I didn't realize the voting process had started.

Another thing - the voting process is _extremely_ tedious. Especially with the contests becoming more popular, going through and voting for every single picture takes waay too much time.

Maybe a two-step voting process would help? First step is picking the top ten, second would be voting individually for the top ten. That would take about 5 minutes of my time rather than 20-30 minutes (depending on load time - I'd imagine on a 56k it would take an hour).


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## SnakeIce (May 9, 2005)

While optimum participation is helpful, that needs to be balanced with giveing good entries a fair chance to win. So I think a final voteing between 8-12 entries would adress that.

The other thing that is hindering participation here is it isn't clear where to go to vote. I went to try to find out what the voteing scale is and spent some time just figureing out where to go. 

I finally tried the link that said entrys can be entered here and found the pictures and voteing pages. If a second link or the description was changed to include the information on where to go to vote(when the time came), it would help participation as well.


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## dennis (Mar 1, 2004)

Voting can be quite tedious. I don't belive that the photo album format encourages voting, especially for peope with slow connections. voting would also be easier if we could see all, or many, of the photos at once in order to compare. I find I have to go through the entier album several times before I can decide which I think are best, then I have to remember which those were. To much work and time is involved for most people I think.


All in all I think it is the Photo Album and time requirement that prevents voting. Also, do we have to vote for each or the top 10 or what? As for the Anubias challenge, what was it about; photo quality, artistic composition of the photograph, plant quality???


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## JanS (Apr 14, 2004)

It is tough to get people to vote in many contests, which can be somewhat disappointing when you get so many nice entries.

To be honest, I just figured out how to vote with this latest contest that's running, so I went through and rated all of the entries, and didn't leave any of them out. I feel it's only fair to all of the entrants if people rate all of them, and not just their favorites.

Perhaps I'm not the only one who didn't see exactly how to place your vote, so it might not hurt to make that a little more clearly defined to the members.


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## zig (Jul 3, 2005)

Well i have to admit i felt pretty dumb because i couldn't figure out how to vote, the intention was there, just the auctual logistics let me down, the "where to" i could figure out, just the auctual "how to" let me down......maybe next time


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## neonfish3 (Feb 12, 2004)

Faruk, it's a very good question. And something I was wondering myself. 
Personally, I'm having trouble with page load times. It's very slow! I don't know if it's my computer or this website. I have DSL and other sites don't seem _*as*_ slow. 
I enjoy the contests very much, but I don't have the time to vote on all of them. I timed it and it was 90 sec. to open a pic., view it full size, vote, then open the next pic. There's over 60 pics!
When I vote, I do vote on all of them. But, I vote on each one independent of the others. Not one against the other. There are usually a couple 10's more 9's and many of the other #'s. My vote is mostly based on how the photo makes me feel, then quality, composition, subject, etc...

The editing rules for a color subject photo contest do make this one harder to judge. I think the rules are too loose. It's very easy with minor adjustments to change/ enhance color. What is REAL? ( if, ya know what I mean) Sometimes the contest becomes unfair because of people who don't have photo editing software or the knowledge to use it, ie, those with $200 photo editing software get better scores than those without it or lesser quality software. ....hmmmm......
.
.
.
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Well I think my page load prob. is with my computer. My hard drive is almost full, mostly with my photos. I'm going to try to clean up my hard drive, get my photos and un-needed stuff off of it, and see if that helps.
Then try to vote again.


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## Faruk Gençöz (Nov 4, 2005)

*How to vote in the contests* in the Photo Album:

1. Go to the orange bar on the top of every page, find "*Photo Album*" on the bar and click it. Clicking will take you to http://www.aquaticplantcentral.com/gallery/index.php

2. There is a list of gallery names beneath the random images. Find "*Aquarium Contests!!*" and click it. It will take you to sub categories.

3. Find the contest you are looking for from the list (in this case *"Reds" A Photo Challenge*) and click it. It will take you to the thumbnail index of the contest. You can do many manipulations on this page:

You can 
i. change the "images per page" to 90 to see all the thumbnails on a single page. This option is provided on the thick blue bar at the top of the page 
ii. sort the images according to their ratings in the descending direction to see all the images sorted from 1st place to the lowest. These options are provided by beneath the "Display Options" blue bar which is at the bottom of the page.

4. Click on the first thumbnail. The bigger image will be displayed. Above the image, there is a blue bar on which you can see the rating. When you click on the rating you will see the menu from which you can choose the score for that image. Point the score and click "vote now".

5. 
i. If you want to rate every image one by one look at the thumbnails underneath the bigger image. You will see the next thumbnail on the right. Click on it, it will be bigger. Go on with the 4th step till the end of the images.

ii. if you want to rate only your favorites then start the 4th step with one of your favorites. After scoring that favorite you can go back and choose the next favorite from the index.


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## GekkoGeck0 (Nov 3, 2005)

The reason I never voted or tried to vote was because I am used to other forums conducting photo voting contests within a thread. I never knew that you had to go to the photo album area to vote.


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## Chris S (Feb 27, 2006)

I usually check new topics or my own personal searches. I don't think I ever noticed the contest from my vantage pint. I have dialup so fast is good. If i saw a button that said "Photo contest! "Reds" " I probably would click it and check it out and vote, however, I have not noticed such a button in my travels.


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## Mellonman (Nov 2, 2005)

I think the rating system is not very good : rating all the entries is too long (especially since viewing pictures on APC is quite long - for me anyway)...

Voters should just have to chose one photo and vote for it. No rating.
It would be much easier and faster, thus more motivating...


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## Faruk Gençöz (Nov 4, 2005)

It seems that the longer downloading time of the pics is a common complaint. This causes the rating of each picture almost impossible. Therefore the suggestions about the alternative rating solutions seem to be compensatory rather than the real problem oriented. If the system could be fast enough many people would not complain about the rating process. However we have had this slower downloading time problem for a long time, so I don't think it will be solved from its root. Therefore we should consider alternative rating strategies. 

Regarding the suggested rating systems there seems to be a spectrum. On the left side of the spectrum there is voting for each entry and on the right we have choosing only one entry. In the middle of the spectrum, I think there is a pre-elimination of the entries so that we can reduce the entries to 5-10.


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## Faruk Gençöz (Nov 4, 2005)

Our downloading speed has significantly improved!
Yippee...


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## MiamiAG (Jan 13, 2004)

Hi everyone! Thanks for taking the time to comment on this and "Thanks" Faruk for starting the thread.

Let me see if I can summarize here from my perspective. The issues I've noticed from your posts and my response:

1. I didn't know there was a contest or where to go find it.

We usually announce it in the Announcement forum. If you use the New Post feature when you visit and you visit regularly, you will spot it. It is also listed in our front page, so you may spot it there.

I do realize that not everyone does the above so we will resort to sending a broadcast email (as was done this morning) to all members who have not disabled emails from Admin. This way, you will receive an email alerting you to the contest.

2. I don't know how to vote.

I think Faruk explained it well. Simply click on an image to go to the specific image's page. On the blue bar above the image is the current rating and number of votes. You click on that and select the 1-10 then hit submit your vote. 

3. It would be better to see all the images at once to compare.

When viewing the thumbnails in the contest category, simply select from the blue bar the images per page drop down. Set it to whatever you want to see all the thumbnails on the same page.

4. APC is slow and the image download is slow.

APC is a very graphic-intensive site because our hobby is very visual. Most other sites are not as graphic-intensive and, hence, load quicker. As it is, a specific entry photo in our Reds contest loaded for me with the following stats: Page generated in *0.54588* seconds with *11* queries [Server Loads: *1.57* 2.50 : 3.48]. This means the page loaded in half a second.

So, the server APC sits in is not the issue. The issue comes with each users connection speed and traffic within the user's pipeline. Obviously, if you are on dial-up, loading images in our contests will take some time. If you're on DSL, you should see the load times that I posted above. Please check your DSL speed using one of the many DSL speed checkers online.

5. I thought we voted in threads like other forums. I don't like the voting for each photo method.

We use a separate program that administers all photos. It is our Photo Album. We don't use threads or forums like other sites because that is an inefficient way to administer a contest. We also don't use polls because you can only vote for one photo that way and you can rate it.

As for why we use the method we do, it is interesting. When we had the Aquascaping Contest, many people complained that they could only vote for one photo. I remember comments like, "It is impossible to only vote for one" or "We should be able to rate photos from 1-10 to make things fair". We are now seeing comments going the other way with these recent contests. It is hard to strike a balance to please everyone.

We have chosen to use the voting we do because it makes things fair. Each contestant should receive feedback on their entry even if it is bad feedback. The rating system does that. Moreover, using a 1-10 scale allows for detailed rating and most people are familiar with it.

We further calculate the number of votes cast to increase fairness. We want at least 10 votes per image so that votes that are at extreme get diluted. The more people voting, the fairer the rating. For example, who should win, an entry that has 1 vote rating it a 10 or an entry with 9 votes of 10 and 1 vote of 9 thereby giving it a 9.9 score? It is for this reason we want more people to vote and to vote for every image.

At the moment, we do not have the capability to kick out the top and bottom score. We also don't have the capability of selecting the top 12 and having the votes on those. Who would make the selection of the top 12? What criteria would be used? How can it be fair? No, it just wouldn't work.

6. I don't know what criteria to use when I vote.

I try to make this explicit when I announce the contest but will try to make it more so from now on. It is a "photo" contest so the picture quality is something that goes into the score. Also, how well the photographer interpreted the theme (e.g., Reds) so artistic interpretation comes into play. Lastly, how does the image make you feel should also play a part. For example, a great photo of a algea-infested anubias shouldn't score very well. A good photo needs to have a good-looking subject, right?

I hope the above answered most of your questions. Please post more comments.


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## SnakeIce (May 9, 2005)

Art_Giacosa said:


> 1. I didn't know there was a contest or where to go find it.
> 
> We usually announce it in the Announcement forum. If you use the New Post feature when you visit and you visit regularly, you will spot it. It is also listed in our front page, so you may spot it there.
> 
> I do realize that not everyone does the above so we will resort to sending a broadcast email (as was done this morning) to all members who have not disabled emails from Admin. This way, you will receive an email alerting you to the contest.


I keep up with anouncements, even read the threads talking about the contests. I may see the new post that says voteing open. When I set down to vote that post has already been marked read. I forget where that post was.

I view the anouncement post as the central location for information on the contest, be it submission location, submission deadline, voteing location link, voteing time frame, contest details. When I went to look at the anouncement for the reds photo contest I didn't find any of the voteing information.

I finally found the closed voteing pages by trial and error.

I think that putting the information in one orgainized place will do as much as sending emails, pms or regular posts that get burried and marked read. If voteing dates arn't finalized add it when you know. Add a post to the locked anouncement thread if editing the contest opening anouncement is an issue.


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## Faruk Gençöz (Nov 4, 2005)

This time we have two ongoing contests which are very simple to contribute to. One is about the horrific algae attacks. There are only 10 pics in this contest, you can easily see them and what you will do is to tick the box and submit which may take less than a minute. That has been so easy but there are 13 votes up till now. This time it is impossible to explain the low voting rate with the complexity of the voting procedure.

The other contest is about the run for the 12,000th member. In fact we have already exceeded this number. Currently it is 12,368. That means we have at least 368 new members. Up till now only 20 of them were able to be referred by the contestants.

I don't think these activities of the forum are true contests. They are the colors of this community where the members are encouraged to give support and show their level of awareness of being a community.


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## Faruk Gençöz (Nov 4, 2005)

SnakeIce said:


> I think that putting the information in one orgainized place will do as much as sending emails, pms or regular posts that get burried and marked read. If voteing dates arn't finalized add it when you know. Add a post to the locked anouncement thread if editing the contest opening anouncement is an issue.


Just wanted to remind this suggestion although I don't think it is the basic issue.


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## zig (Jul 3, 2005)

Ok voted, some very strong contenders, but there can only be one King/Queen of algae 0n APC, may the best person win!! Thanks for the reminder faruk.


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