Kethandra
Pan-curious, Puckish
- Joined
- Oct 2, 2014
- Posts
- 752
An opinion
I'm with you on this one, RedZ.
There's a reason unwritten rules aren't written: they ain't in the rules.
In Og's case, he quickly realized, 'Oh crap, I submitted that wrong'. It seems to be pretty silly and unreasonable to me to keep a known erroneous work up to be viewed by 10s of thousands of readers in order to go along with the handful of people who might care that an extra 'unwritten rule' that they project onto the contest has been violated.
Other contests have a rule like this, either stated or implied by the format (you sent it in, you're done), though often there is nothing preventing a nearly identical 'corrected' story as a second submission in those cases. Those are other contests, with their own rules. Not this one, with this format and it's own rules.
If someone thinks submitting an inferior story to the first onslaught of votes and then submitting improvements as the vote stream slows down would be a model for contest success, good luck with that. It makes no sense to submit an inferior story this way, exposing the worst version to the most votes.
To me, it makes as little sense to keep a known but accidentally inferior version up for thousands of viewers instead of offering the intended version as soon as the accident is noted. If editing stories mid-contest was a real issue, it would be easy enough to add a real rule instead of trying to enforce an imaginary one.
I have a lot of respect for authors here and value their feedback, but giving the thousands and thousands of potential readers the product I intended, within the official rules, outweighs pleasing the (I'm guessing) ten or less, mainly authors, who would know or care that an edit was done to correct an honest mistake.
I'm with you on this one, RedZ.
There's a reason unwritten rules aren't written: they ain't in the rules.
In Og's case, he quickly realized, 'Oh crap, I submitted that wrong'. It seems to be pretty silly and unreasonable to me to keep a known erroneous work up to be viewed by 10s of thousands of readers in order to go along with the handful of people who might care that an extra 'unwritten rule' that they project onto the contest has been violated.
Other contests have a rule like this, either stated or implied by the format (you sent it in, you're done), though often there is nothing preventing a nearly identical 'corrected' story as a second submission in those cases. Those are other contests, with their own rules. Not this one, with this format and it's own rules.
If someone thinks submitting an inferior story to the first onslaught of votes and then submitting improvements as the vote stream slows down would be a model for contest success, good luck with that. It makes no sense to submit an inferior story this way, exposing the worst version to the most votes.
To me, it makes as little sense to keep a known but accidentally inferior version up for thousands of viewers instead of offering the intended version as soon as the accident is noted. If editing stories mid-contest was a real issue, it would be easy enough to add a real rule instead of trying to enforce an imaginary one.
I have a lot of respect for authors here and value their feedback, but giving the thousands and thousands of potential readers the product I intended, within the official rules, outweighs pleasing the (I'm guessing) ten or less, mainly authors, who would know or care that an edit was done to correct an honest mistake.
