Voting Booth - September Photo Competition - Humorous Bird Photo (1 Viewer)

BarbaraM said:

Great pics - funny captions. But here's my cynical question of the month - how is it that photos that don't meet the rules/guidelines get selected for the final voting (e.g., must include state/county, country location)? Barbara

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IanF said:

Apologies Barbara for not getting back to you sooner - I somehow missed your query until now. A very poingant question indeed.

One day I'll enforce this rule - honest! 'Every' and I mean 'every' competition we've run this is the most and quite often only rule that's been regularly ignored.

For prize competitions it's an automatic disqualification - so everyone be warned!

For the monthly theme challenges though some, well actually a lot of latitude so far has been shown. The reason being and this competition is a very good time to mention it, as there were so many infringements - is that if it had been enforced then a very high percentage of entries would have been disqualified.

It's perhaps a little unfair on those who did conform to all of the rules but considering the theme this month it seemd fairer to let this rule be relaxed (more accurately 'ignored') once again.

In future especially with so many entries being submitted each month and it being more and more difficult to trim down entries down to just 30 for the voting booth, that may not always be the case!

The main reasons for this particular rule - which may encourage more compliance - are that people like to know where a photo was taken. As we are a well and truly 'Worldwide' site with members from every corner of the Earth, I'd suggest very few members (me included) know where every member hales from. Quite often on an entry no location is given at all but also a photo listed as being from a particular town is simply not enough information eg. Washington - is that UK or USA - if so which Washington in the USA / UK or wherever else there's a Washington?

Adding the town and country also helps with moving photos to their appropriate forums on completion of voting. An alternative option would be to delete all entries after voting has finished which would be a shame as the competition entries attract by far the highest number of comments not to mention number of views of any photos in the Gallery - even if they don't win the competition!

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IanF said:

Really it's down to each member to decide which entry to vote for and the reasons for picking that one over another.

Considering we're asking for a humorous photo of a wild bird, it's not the easiest of tasks to achieve. Some photos need a good caption to help along the humour whilst with others the humour is obvious from the picture itself.

I think humour is also related to culture so a photo chosen by someone living in the UK may have less appeal to a member in Asia or the Americas.

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The entry must contain a wild bird or group of birds showing humour or with a humorous caption.

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IanF said:

Captions were particularly mentioned in the rules - so it would have been unfair to select only photos that didn't have them.

Short answer though is 'Yes'.

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Grousemore said:

Great answer, Ian, you should have been a politician!

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kas said:

How come if BF has 31,342 members, only 126 people have voted with just over an hour to go?

I would have expected alot more votes, the pictures are very good.

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