How do the monthly contests work again?

[manyeyedhydra]

November's went up this morning.

Current Erotic Horror Top List at the same time:

5 4.88 51 Succubus Summoning 108 manyeyedhydra 11/19/08

52 4.74 70 Mira Ch. 15 secretme 11/04/08

Nov's category winners:

Erotic Horror - Mira Ch. 15 / secretme

? ? ? ?

Congrats to the winners though. I think I was 1 point (and probably a lot of tiebreaker votes) off third

 

[cloudy]

Because those are the November winners, using November's statistics.

The scores right now have no bearing, really, on what the scores were at the end of the November scoring period.

 

[loganforester]

I beleive the relevant scores were those on December 15th. Unless you tracked them on that date, no real way to know for sure now.

 

[manyeyedhydra]

Yep, that's what it states in the contest rules. Wouldn't mind some corroboration on this though as the winners have always reflected the current scores from the time of announcing the results from what I've seen.

I noticed there were a lot of sweeps before the september and october announcements (mainly because I'd been holding the high score for the erotic horror cat in September until the chapter was swept from 60 votes to 9 for some reason), so that's why I'm not certain the winners are locked as of the 15th of the next month (could be wrong though - only going on what I've observed)

Not especially bothered as I was outside the overall top 3 anyway, but it did look a little odd.

 

[Darkniciad]

All votes are probably time-stamped. Trying to track monthly contests otherwise would be damn near impossible.

Odds are that you didn't accumulate ( after the monthly contest sweep ) 50 votes prior to the end of the month that you submitted the story. You've picked up votes since, but they don't count for purposes of deciding the monthly winner.

If only one story gets at least 50 votes, even if it has a score of 1.01, it will be the monthly winner.

If none have 50 votes, it seems like I remember the bar dropping to 25, same criteria. Highest score with 25 or more votes.

So on and so forth until you get down to "no stories submitted this month"

 

[manyeyedhydra]

All votes are probably time-stamped. Trying to track monthly contests otherwise would be damn near impossible.

Odds are that you didn't accumulate ( after the monthly contest sweep ) 50 votes prior to the end of the month that you submitted the story. You've picked up votes since, but they don't count for purposes of deciding the monthly winner.

If only one story gets at least 50 votes, even if it has a score of 1.01, it will be the monthly winner.

If none have 50 votes, it seems like I remember the bar dropping to 25, same criteria. Highest score with 25 or more votes.

So on and so forth until you get down to "no stories submitted this month"

Could have been a delay in data refresh. I came back and noticed there'd been a sweep. This knocked off some troll dreck (score up to 4.89 ) but took the votes down below 50 . I might have been seeing stale data when I checked the top lists.

This assumes the scores are tallied just before announcement, which I am a little curious about.

I know the scores are supposed to be taken on the 15th of the following month, but it's always looked like the scores are tallied just before announcement to me. Whenever I've checked the winners, they've always been the top 3 at that precise point. I know votes accumulate slowly outside of the first week, but I would expect some drift in the scores considering it's been three to four months since the chop off point.

I'm fairly certain I've had a story win a cat that didn't get over the 50 mark until long after - can't remember if there were other 50+ stories out that same month, think there might have been though.

I'm not totally certain. It seems to me like the score tallying point is just before announcement, but I'll happily accept I'm wrong if someone has better evidence to the contrary.

 

[Darkniciad]

The scores probably are tallied just before the announcement, but the votes eligible are determined by the time-stamp of the votes. Likewise, the monthly contest sweeps are probably restricted to votes from that month, as well.

That's how I would do it, anyway.

No way of knowing for sure, but I can't see anyone expecting to be here on the minute to do the number crunching every month. Time-stamps are the logical answer.

 

[manyeyedhydra]

The scores probably are tallied just before the announcement, but the votes eligible are determined by the time-stamp of the votes. Likewise, the monthly contest sweeps are probably restricted to votes from that month, as well.

Could be, but in that case I would expect the monthly contest score (votes cast before the cut off point) to be different from the current observed score (votes cast before cut off + votes cast after cut off). It probably wouldn't be that different, but it wouldn't need to be that different when you consider there's usually only a point or two differentiating the top stories. Whenever I've checked, the winners have always been the ones with the highest current observed scores (in this case 4.91, 4.89 and 4.89).

It wouldn't surprise me if they're just taking the current observed scores even though it's a little later than planned. Otherwise they'd have to take a lot more crap from people wondering why the top 3 announced don't match the top 3 they can see in the various top lists.

Only my impression though, haven't checked the data in anywhere near enough detail, so I could be wrong.