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It’s contest time! This is the official contest forum thread. Feel free to ask questions, talk smack, etc. 🙂
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So stoked for this contest!! Pretty sure this is the most expensive grand prize in Singletracks contest history
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Digging through all my old hard drives for some pics…some may be from the late 80s haha!! All those years of snapping pics along the ride…I was born for this contest!!!
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This contest was just what I needed to get off my butt and get involved with the site again, really fell off after singletracks was taken off tapatalk. Its worth it for the stickers! I love the new design by the way!
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Digging the new design and thanks for the extra motivation to post / ride and generally enjoy the spirit of competition. For the duration of the contest, there should be temporary bump in points for trail status update; I could use the extra encouragement to get off the couch and ride.
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Agree sweet prize !! (that just got me a half point right there).
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@ssirois, haha, now you’re thinking!! 😉
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A quick heads up: I am actively deleting any off topic photos or content that does not relate to mountain biking. So if you’re wondering why your point total is diminishing, that’s probably why.
Please don’t upload non-mtb photos–that simply wastes both of our time.
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I second that! Once the contest is officially over we’ll be going through the top finishers’ contributions one by one. That means we’ll look at every photo, review, etc. for folks in contention for prizes and will and delete things that are off topic, duplicate, plagiarized, etc.
If in doubt about any content you’re thinking about posting, ask yourself: will another mountain biker find this helpful? If not, don’t post it.
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Question for you moderator folks… Is CX deemed acceptable?
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Cyclocross is off topic so no, we aren’t interested in photos of CX bikes. Now, if you happened to ride a mountain bike trail with a bunch of guys on ‘cross bikes and they happen to be in your trail photos, that’s ok. 🙂
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What about cat videos? Is there a max I can upload?
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Something to consider for future contest…..
Rather than giving away the top prize to the individual with the most points (or most whatever)….How about doing some kind of weighted raffle system? So say for every X number of points contributed, then you get your name into the raffle, the more points the more chances to win, and this way EVERYONE who contributes gets a chance at the top prize. You may get better quality submissions & potentially more. In my case, I kind of gave up “trying to win” when I knew there was no way that I’d be able to keep up with the amount of content others may have as well as the time & effort required to do it. If it were a raffle of some sort, I’d probably still be “trying to win”.
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Ok, contest rule update time!
We’ve modified the rules to only award points for uploaded photos that are attached to a listing. What does that mean? Well, when you upload a photo from the homepage, there’s a field titled “Featured trail, bike, shop, or race.” You’ll need to use the typeahead and select a trail, piece of MTB gear, shop, or race to attach your photos to. This will ensure that photos are relevant and, most importantly, they’ll actually be useful to people who visit Singletracks!
If you’ve already uploaded photos that aren’t tied to a trail, piece of gear, shop, or race, you can go in and edit the photo to attach it to the correct listing.
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Thanks for the suggestion sssirois. We’ve actually run contests this way in the past and it works pretty well too, though there are tradeoffs with either approach. It turns out many people aren’t very motivated to enter contests decided by chance, even if there is a way to increase odds. Then again, I definitely get that it’s frustrating to even try when it seems the leaders are so far ahead.
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+1 to what Jeff just said. Also, I do want to note that we have a few contests coming down the pipe later this year that will be decided by QUALITY and not QUANTITY, so hopefully those contests will provide plenty of opportunity for folks who may have less time, but want to submit a quality product!
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this is interesting but I am not sure totally what or if I am signed up. how do I sign up/ make sure I am signed up? etc.
why no singletracks on tapatalk?
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Hey RidingPastor, what do you want to sign up for? The competition? If so, there’s no need to sign up–just make sure you’re logged in to your account before you start submitting content!
Regarding Singletracks and Tapatalk, we initially used tapatalk as a stop gap to provide a mobile-friendly way to use the Singletracks forums. However, since that time, we’ve rolled out a mobile-friendly forum design on our native website, which means you can easily use the forum on your smartphone, straight from Singletracks.com
Hope that makes sense!
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thanks Greg I appreciate the response. NOt sure why I wasnt notified that you responded but I think I am good now.
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I think this contest has awesome power to create a massive database of photos, information, etc. riders can use to orient themselves with the trail, make decisions about gear, etc. and convince some folks to ride a trail, buy a product, join a race, etc. Unfortunately, it’s a double edge sword and it has ended up completely diluting quality and shitting on another’s Singletracks.com interaction. Some people work pretty hard, are very talented (or just mean well) and take time out of their ride to capture a meaningful photo for the site. Hey, I’m no saint… I’ve uploaded some pretty poor quality photos, but I’m working on it.
I also feel bad for you, Jeff, Greg, and Aaron, who’ve brought this site so far for having to sift through some of the utter garbage that some are dumping on a great resource.
One question comes to mind when deciding if a photo is “good” or not: Does this photograph ENRICH the encounter one will have when viewed? A blurry close-up of a frog taken on a night ride does IN NO WAY enrich my encounter with Singletracks.com. For crying out loud, stop being shit heads!
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I agree with Chris 1 million percent – quantity based contests have some serious negative potential. I happened to get lucky and was just starting to increase my contributions recently when I saw this contest, which basically means that all of the things I haven’t reviewed for the past few years I’m getting a chance to now – I don’t know that that’s entirely fair, but I suppose the contest is a great way to get a lot of people contributing who normally wouldn’t. I suppose we’ll see if it was all worth it in about a week once the dust settles.
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No1, I think you are going about it the right way and it IS fair to get your older photos and reviews up as they are likely still relevant. Indeed, the winner of this contest is someone like you who hasn’t uploaded in a while and can afford to do so while those who consistently update are at a disadvantage and must scramble to get new content in. It’s not unfair, just part of the strategy. It’ll be worth it for sure as long as all the crap gets deleted by the Senior editing staff – a whole 3.5 people mind you that have a lot more to do than referee douchey submissions. Good luck!
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Good discussion and feedback about the contest. Like Greg mentioned, we have contests scheduled for each quarter of this year and each one is set up a little differently. Obviously this one rewards quantity without focusing too much on quality, though there is certainly a floor on the quality we’re accepting.
While winning the top prizes might seem to be out of reach for a lot of people at this point, I wanted to remind everyone about the side prizes that are up for grabs:
- Everyone who earns 30 points in the contest gets a Singletracks Pro membership for a year.
- Everyone who earns > 0 points gets free stickers.
- Anyone who adds a trail photo through the end of March is entered to win a Singletracks merch pack with a t-shirt, stickers, and can cooler. We’re giving out one prize pack for every US state (that’s 50) and country (another 25 or so) which means odds are good for those who have uploaded a decent # of photos. It also helps to upload photos in an area where no one else is active. So for example, we’ll look at all the members who submitted photos of trails in Alabama and will pick one of those members to receive a prize.
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Thanks for all of the great discussion everyone, we really appreciate all of the opinions and effort that you have put forth and continue to put forth in this contest!Singletracks has been running points contests just like this one (along with many different variations of this format) since before I was even an employee, and back in the day I personally competed in many of these. I thought I’d share a few random thoughts from my times competing in similar contests, and about how the Singletracks database handles this content.These points contests (quantity-driven) are always incredibly competitive, and require a lot of hard work, time, and energy to win. Generally speaking, to the most tenacious contributor go the spoils! However, I’ve been extremely tenacious in the past, but despite my tenacity, there were a couple of contests that I really wanted to win, but I missed the grand prize. Specifically, one time I narrowly missed 1st place in a contest giving away a Diamondback frame, and in another I lost on a trip to BC with Sacred Rides. Long story short, it takes a tremendous amount of effort to win these contests! And in the end, the main reason I lost those two memorable ones was because I could only spare so much time to upload data… sure, maybe I could have pulled some all nighters, but I chose not too ???? Tenacity is key.As a result of all that hard work, many contest winners—who may not have contributed much after the conclusion of the contest—are still ranked among the all-time top content contributors on Singletracks.com, even years after the fact.Speaking of time commitment, yeah, we’re getting a ton of content submitted, and while it will take a lot of work to moderate and review it all, that’s my job, after all—I get paid to do it and am more than willing to do that work ????As for quality vs quantity, I don’t think that these contest contributions are diluting out the quality of the Singletracks database. Heck, we have over 102,000 photos in our database—it would take a lot of work to dilute that out.Also, I do want to mention that even if the photos submitted aren’t professional-grade shots, that something is ALWAYS better than nothing. Despite those 102,000 photos, over 33% of all of our trail listings don’t have ANY photos associated with them. None. Zero. Zilch. Not so much as 1. We are HUNGRY for your data, and would love to get as many mountain bike photos as possible!However, if you do spot some photos that you think are simply atrocious, we encourage everyone to rate them. If a photo truly sucks, give it a 1 star review. Similarly, if you see a truly fantastic shot, give it 5 stars. Through these photo ratings, our members—that’s you guys—control what floats to the top, and what sinks to the bottom. While yes, some of these trail listings may acquire 500 or more photos, but if you are rating and reviewing said photos, the best ones will float to the top, and will be viewed the most. If a trail listing has 500 photos, the one-star-ratings are never, ever going to get seen, and the 5-star-ratings are going to get a ton of love.In conclusion, Singletracks has always been designed to be as open source and wiki-like as possible. We depend on our members to submit photos. We depend on our members to rank them to decide which photos show up. (For that matter, be sure to review and rank trails, trail systems, reviews that users have left for trails, gear, trail maps, bike shops, etc…. everything works the same way, with the highest-rated content floating to the top.) We depend on our members to notify us when trail data needs to be updated. While as a staff we will be sure to eliminate any duplicate or off topic content submitted during this contest, the duties of ranking, ordering, and determining the quality of the content that’s submitted to the database rest on the collective backs of our over 300,000 registered members. So get ranking and reviewing—there’s a lot of great content to look at!
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Cool. Good to know, Greg, thanks. There should be a little incentive to rate photos in order to encourage feedback and get those good pics to the top. Like, 0.25 points
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Awarding points for rating photos: great idea! When we run the photo contest we usually have prizes for the top rated photos PLUS prizes for the top photo raters. In our last contest I think the top photo raters were rating like, thousands of photos each.
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