@Wreybies, @thirdwind, @theoriginalmonsterman, @Zerotonin Hey guys, I need your feedback. Right now we have a custom add-on that was designed to make contest administration easier, the contest anonymizer. For XF2 it will have to be redesigned, so I wanted to stop by and get feedback from context admins and users on the system, see if you’re currently using it as intended, and see if there’s any major feature or functionality missing. It looks like everyone is using it for submissions, but some contest types have separate voting threads. Do you manually deanonymize in this case? Current Functionality: Contest admin can create a submission thread that automatically anonymized the user of each submission. They can then later add a poll and set it to deanonymize the entries once voting has ended, or manually deanonymize threads. I’m trying to determine if I should have the developer create it exactly as is, or make changes. Main Question: Does this seem to work well, and can it be improved?
To answer your question, yes, I manually deanonymize after the poll has ended. Overall, the current system is pretty much fine for me. I haven't had any issues from the admin side of things. I can think of two things we may want to discuss. 1) Right now, members can edit their entry during a certain period of time after submission. I'm not sure how long the time frame is or if it depends on member status (e.g., a Senior Member has more time to edit the post compared to a New Member). I just want to make sure all members have equal permissions for this. 2) This may not be an issue at all, but when someone "likes" an anonymized post, is the "like" transferred over to the original member after the posts are deanonymized? This is a minor thing, but I believe people should get to keep any recognition their entries receive.
I'm not a contest admin, but I want to pitch in with 'likes' of an anonymized post. Being a scientist, opinion bias might be a problem. If an anonymized post is getting 'Likes', it might skew others to 'Like' it as well, which might skew the final voting because I think people are more likely to vote for something which already gathered 'Likes'. Note, I'm not absolutely sure that what I think is true. This is just my opinion, and I'm also not a social scientist. You might consider withdrawing the 'Likes' possibility from anonymized contributions. After the polling, it could be added again, so people can give the authors their feedback
Currently the system works fine for the poetry contests. Of course, one thing that might be nice is if you could set a timer for anonymized posts and after set period of time they become deanonymized, but it's not really necessary just a preference. In my opinion, if it ain't broke don't fix it. EDIT: One other thing that would help if it could be implemented is a limit on how many submissions you can post to a thread. People are only allowed to post one entry per contest, so it'd be nice if there was something that could restrict them from posting more than one post. Perhaps a custom limit for how many posts a user can post per thread.
Thank you guys. This really helps me move forward finalizing my plans for this particular functionality, and I’m glad to see it seems to work as is. Regarding likes, I’m not sure if they’re transferred after deanonymized or not, we could test it, but I can consider it in the re-write. I agree with the bias aspect. It would be better to hide who liked an entry until after the contest (and display a number of likes) or allow likes but hide them until afterwards. The fair edit time limit is a valid point, should be an easy fix with the default functionality, I’ll see about implementing it. If not now then on the new version. As for submission limits, I agree but it probably isn’t worth including into the core re-write of this add-on. Are you guys using the functionality where contest admins have to approve / moderate each post for the public, or was that just something we used in the past? I’ll see about easy ways of implementing this.
One other thing that has crossed over to a related thread is that when the competition is deanonymized, any users that have voted for their own works should be brought to the attention of the contest administrator.
