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Dear RhymeZone Community,
Feedback for a future contest based on this one:
I want to say thank you to rhymezone and its staff for doing this contest! Nearly all of us feel that it was a great experience and at the very least served to produce a new poem for us. That being said, I want to offer some feedback about the contest and the way it was done in hopes of improving it if it turns out to be an annual prize.
First off, making it a free entry is something that is extra special, and I think should, if possible, be left that way in the future. Most contests require an entry fee and kudos to you guys for not doing that. Us unpublished and unknown starving poets appreciate it tremendously.
Secondly, I think that in the future, you should make it so that there is a limit of one entry per contestant. I don't really see any great reasons for allowing people to submit an infinite number of entries. It serves to be inefficient and ultimately unnecessary. I think most people would agree that it would be more fair and proper to limit everyone to one entry for the contest per contestant. It was nice of you to allow people to submit as many as they wanted, but in looking at the submissions, it turned out that many people turned in poems that had very very little to do with the contest topic. Honestly, it's a gross waste of time trying to shift through entries that have nothing to do with the topic, especially when they number in the hundreds. If a little more than 3000 people participated and there were over 3500 entries, that means one in seven such entries was probably superfluous. Not to mention, if somebody did happen to have two really good submissions, and both made it to the final selection, because only one per contestant can win, it's taking the place of another potential winner and that's just simply unfair. Maybe some of you disagree with me, but I feel very strongly that having only one entry per person would do a lot to help the contest rather than hinder it.
Lastly, I'm not sure how to say this, but I'm still trying to figure this out: "[we] loaded them [the contest entries] into a custom software tool that made it easier to read through the entries more efficiently. Using this tool we picked several hundred finalists from the submissions." I would like some more information about what exactly this tool is and what it does to make it easier to read through them. If nothing else, as a poetry teacher, I would like to know because I'm often grading dozens if not hundreds of poems, and that could be useful information for me. Not to mention, in the future it may help some of us tailor our poems better to fit the selection criteria. How you read through poems more efficiently is quite beyond me. Did it use some kind of way to identify structures or rhymes? What did this tool do and how did it do it?
The poor judges, five in all, were faced with the task of going through 3,500+ poems. Even giving each poem a fair once through reading would mean each judge had only 28 days to go through 700 poems each. And then, give a closer reading to the finalists selected. Honestly, you should expand the number of judges and give them more time. Even with this magic poetry reading tool, that's a nearly impossible task to give a fair reading in only 28 days of 3500+ poems by 5 people. I don't think it's crazy of me to suggest the following:
1. Expand the panel to ten judges.
2. Give the judges at least one month per thousand entries.
In closing, I also advocate what someone else suggested about collecting all the entries into a massive collection for publication. I suggest online, here in the rhymezone community, and perhaps starting a thread for a volunteer committee to put it together and try to edit it, and give the authors the opportunity to say whether they have permission to do it. In the future as well, you could tell the people who submit entries that by submitting they agree to allow their work to appear in a compilation of the contest entries. Anyway, thank you everyone for your time and attention and I wish you all happy days writing more poetry to share with all of us at rhymezone.
Best regards,
Solace_Zeta
Feedback for a future contest based on this one:
I want to say thank you to rhymezone and its staff for doing this contest! Nearly all of us feel that it was a great experience and at the very least served to produce a new poem for us. That being said, I want to offer some feedback about the contest and the way it was done in hopes of improving it if it turns out to be an annual prize.
First off, making it a free entry is something that is extra special, and I think should, if possible, be left that way in the future. Most contests require an entry fee and kudos to you guys for not doing that. Us unpublished and unknown starving poets appreciate it tremendously.
Secondly, I think that in the future, you should make it so that there is a limit of one entry per contestant. I don't really see any great reasons for allowing people to submit an infinite number of entries. It serves to be inefficient and ultimately unnecessary. I think most people would agree that it would be more fair and proper to limit everyone to one entry for the contest per contestant. It was nice of you to allow people to submit as many as they wanted, but in looking at the submissions, it turned out that many people turned in poems that had very very little to do with the contest topic. Honestly, it's a gross waste of time trying to shift through entries that have nothing to do with the topic, especially when they number in the hundreds. If a little more than 3000 people participated and there were over 3500 entries, that means one in seven such entries was probably superfluous. Not to mention, if somebody did happen to have two really good submissions, and both made it to the final selection, because only one per contestant can win, it's taking the place of another potential winner and that's just simply unfair. Maybe some of you disagree with me, but I feel very strongly that having only one entry per person would do a lot to help the contest rather than hinder it.
Lastly, I'm not sure how to say this, but I'm still trying to figure this out: "[we] loaded them [the contest entries] into a custom software tool that made it easier to read through the entries more efficiently. Using this tool we picked several hundred finalists from the submissions." I would like some more information about what exactly this tool is and what it does to make it easier to read through them. If nothing else, as a poetry teacher, I would like to know because I'm often grading dozens if not hundreds of poems, and that could be useful information for me. Not to mention, in the future it may help some of us tailor our poems better to fit the selection criteria. How you read through poems more efficiently is quite beyond me. Did it use some kind of way to identify structures or rhymes? What did this tool do and how did it do it?
The poor judges, five in all, were faced with the task of going through 3,500+ poems. Even giving each poem a fair once through reading would mean each judge had only 28 days to go through 700 poems each. And then, give a closer reading to the finalists selected. Honestly, you should expand the number of judges and give them more time. Even with this magic poetry reading tool, that's a nearly impossible task to give a fair reading in only 28 days of 3500+ poems by 5 people. I don't think it's crazy of me to suggest the following:
1. Expand the panel to ten judges.
2. Give the judges at least one month per thousand entries.
In closing, I also advocate what someone else suggested about collecting all the entries into a massive collection for publication. I suggest online, here in the rhymezone community, and perhaps starting a thread for a volunteer committee to put it together and try to edit it, and give the authors the opportunity to say whether they have permission to do it. In the future as well, you could tell the people who submit entries that by submitting they agree to allow their work to appear in a compilation of the contest entries. Anyway, thank you everyone for your time and attention and I wish you all happy days writing more poetry to share with all of us at rhymezone.
Best regards,
Solace_Zeta
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