Too Few Duels for the Daily Contests.
Answered
I've reported this a few times using the help button on my page. Surely I am not the only one concerned about the exorbitant length of time it is taking to reach 100 duels. Daily awards were delayed, starting a couple of years ago, to give more time for duels since those awards were not at all relevant with the reduced number of votes given. Now, it is taking more than a week to get to 100 duels... even for the best images in the contests. The top image for both flowers and animals on October 1st (two of the biggest categories) still have only 64 duels each. Nature Up Close, a smaller category only has 57 duels for the top image. Voting has already started for October 8th!
I honestly feel this is a marketing problem since there are far fewer people using the site than in past years. But why has nothing been done to improve marketing? I never see any ads anywhere to promote the site. Without more efforts to market Pixoto, the only other solutions to this problem are to adjust the algorithm to allot more duels for daily contests, or limit the number of new community contests allowed (perhaps just allowing two per photographer).
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Official comment
Hello Judy, the ultimate number of votes that an image gets is dependent on its early dueling history. The more early wins an image has the higher its ImageScore will go and the more duels it will ultimately receive. The highest rated unpaused images on the site will end up with four times (or more) duels than the lowest. After the first 50 duels or so the change in ImageScore with each additional duel slows down. Essentially the first 50 or so duels define the approximate area of the leaderboard an image should be and the remaining duels refine that placement.
I hope this helps.
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That does not help at all. I've been using this site for years and completely understand how it is supposed to work. You completely missed my point. I'm not even bothering to look at the middle rated and lowest rated images. The HIGHEST rated images are not getting many duels! The top images used to get 100+ duels in a matter of two to three days. Now it is taking ten days or more for the best images to get that number of duels. It usually takes more than 100 duels to break that 700+ barrier. How can you give out legitimate awards when the duels just aren't there? You will need to delay the awards even longer than you already do to get somewhat accurate results. Example: For last week in Animals, #1 is still #1 two days later, but the #5 image has moved up all the way to the #2 position. That image in the #1 position already has 115 duels, but the one in the #2 position only has 82 duels even though it was submitted on September 30th and we are all the way to October 9th now. With a current score of 711, there is no justification for that image to only have 82 duels still. In fact, this image recently won a duel against the #1 image (that has had 115 duels) and is within one point of taking over the top position. How is it fair that it only got a #5 award for the week? I know that images move up and down all the time. That is to be expected, but the only reason this image didn't win a higher award was that it didn't have enough duels by the time the weekly awards were given. That is not fair.
The HIGHEST rated image in animals for October 1st still only has 70 duels and we have already started duels for October 9th. That image has a score of 690, so it's not like it is a loser! The highest rated flower for October 1st is currently a 687 and still has only 70 duels so far. Do you see my point yet?
Let's go back even farther. The top rated image in People for September 28th has an image score of 661 and still only has 88 duels... in eleven days! That is ridiculous! How can even the weekly awards be legitimate when it takes so long to get a fair sampling of duels? The only categories that had any images with 100 duels for September 28th were Animals and Transportation.... and that was a very few of the total images. More duels need to be targeted to the daily competitions than is currently happening. If it takes longer to end the community duels, than so be it. Please, fix this!
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I'll comment on this briefly.
Hi Judy,
What you are commenting on is correlated to an issue we experienced during a major infrastructure upgrade.
As mentioned in the weekly email, during an upgrade we lost about ~10k duels which required some time for the system to catch up. This did not impact credits earned or contest votes.
Also mentioned in the weekly email, we introduced a slight change that would direct more duels from contests to the general vote. Contests are now currently only getting 18% of the daily vote.
We are monitoring the system and everything appears to be catching up.
Best,
-- Scott
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Jasenka,
Please let Scott know that this is still a big problem and is discouraging for those not as interested in the community contests as they are in category awards. Daily submissions are still not getting enough votes. Check out Stanley P as an example. His main category is Animals, and he is one of the best photographers, so his images do well in the daily duels. That said, his images from January 2nd still only have from 63-70 votes. It's unlikely that they will reach 100 before the weekly awards are given. It should not take more than a week for high quality images to reach 100 votes. I haven't tallied, but I've noted that the great majority of my votes are for contests. It might help if you limit community contests to no more than 500 entries or limit how many contests a moderator can sponsor per month, or cut them down from three at a time to only two at a time. Those are just some ideas, because something needs to change.
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May I echo Judy’s concerns.
like Judy, I have been a member for a number of years and can remember when all Pro member images reached 100 duels in two days.
I take your point about lost duels during an earlier upgrade but even now ten days into the new year images are still not reaching 100 duels in a reasonable time, two weeks is not reasonable.
is it lack of members voting? A few years ago if this happened members received an email requesting them to undertake extra voting.
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Well, unfortunately, because we extended 3 large sponsored contests to the end of year, they all went to voting at the same time. It required a lot of votes to award all those contests at the same time. We will continue to monitor the progress, but things should catch back up now.
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