Discourse sets things up so that once 5 minutes have elapsed from the time of poll creation they can no longer be modified, because it also sets up that if a polls coding is modified, all votes are removed.
SO.
Because the piece of the coding that I messed up was part of the coding that allows us to actually implement the ranked-choice voting that makes these contests run, no matter what we did the polls would break and nothing would matter.
So it’s literally a choice between “Restart the Polls and let everyone know” or “don’t restart the polls, get to the end of day 3 of voting, and have to restart anyways because we cannot rank the votes.”
It’s wildly unfortunate, yes. However, those hundred+ votes you are concerned about also occurred within the first four hours of polls that will be up for days. I for one am not concerned in the slightest about people not hearing about either them going down, or them coming back up. The fact remains that when they do come back, there will once again be days with which to vote, and given that the last contests have all had north of 400 votes, I’d venture to guess the 1/4 people who voted in the polls that went up yesterday are probably regulars of the boards, or discord servers with people who are.
Now if i’m wrong and everything goes completely sideways, feel free to blame me. It was a mistake on my end. Feel free to blame Discourse, our Forum host, as well, for making it so that polls cannot be edited or fixed outside of a 5 minute window.
In the meantime, when the polls come back online, vote and tell your friends to do so. 4 Hours of polling that lasts 3 days is not indicative of the final vote.
I currently have no idea when the polls will start back up. When they do, there will once again be a banner on the top of the boards, as well as a video on the channel, and a whole bunch of media blasting to let you know they’ve started properly this time.
Given the recent problem with Blue entry for the Artakha artwork, I have a proposal to avoid this in future contests.
After the deadline (where no new entries are allowed), there should be a grace period (a day, a week, as much time the staff needed) for them to point out what changes are necesaries for the entries to be accepted in the polls (let’s say change a color, more photos, etc.)
This would give an opurtunity to the last minute entries (that seems to be the majority) to correct their entries. Entries that enter with time still can be notified before that, what changes are necesaries.
This doesn’t mean that the staff can’t disqualified someone from the beginig, like for example someone upload just a photo of an axle intead of a MOC or draw a stick figure.
Question: it probably was asked, but I want a clarification: can an entry be posted here for
a) gathering feedback
b) defense from random plagiarism. For Hagah, there really might be some unwanted coincidences in builds, so this is very important for me.
And, if it can, should it be marked somehow? Like “future canonization contest entry” in title? Furhthermore, if posted like that, can a MOC be chaged and re-posted during the entry period? Thank you in advance.
does this mean that the five polls up now for the Artakha contest (One to Five) are replacements for the five polls(that ended on Wednesday) that were given adjectives for Artakha(e.g. Builder, Creator. Sadly I can’t remember the exact words) and the five polls can be voted in right now, or are these the same as the adjective polls from before Wednesday where our votes have been counted in and voting in the empty vote ballot at the moment would be a repeat vote? I’m just clarifying as I don’t want to repeat my existing votes by mistake if the current polls are the same as Wednesday’s. Thank you in anticipation
The entries in the polls are the same, they are in the same order that before, but the voting was restarted. It is a completely new votation and you have to vote again.
Misprints definitely are. Stuff like the translucent yellow Kaukau, right?
Prototypes are a little trickier. Remember, though, painting parts is allowed, so why wouldn’t you be allowed to use a part molded in another colour? (as long as it is monotone, I suppose)
