The following is from the pm mentioned earlier.
I think it's a bad idea if you show results; it discourages people when they see X has a big lead. Along the same lines don't tell people how many riddles are left or total. Instead of having some fixed number lets just make it more fun and have it as "how many were submitted" (so nobody knows but you) and so up to the last second nobody knows if they don't have a chance at it or not. It also avoid drawing the contest unnecessarily.
Regarding the administrative part. There can probably use just one thread, just edit the title to reflect the riddle count; or if it's not too much trouble ideally a new thread for each riddle and just merge the old one into a master thread.
Now about the riddles themselves...
First and most important of all, the "provide a explanation" need to go. It is unnecessary complications and fallible. I think having people guessing encourages more people to guess. Take for example that clue for #1 that told them the poster their looking has to have 100 posts at least. That was probably a really really bad idea.
It means people weren't posting half-bad ideas, and that's bad because by trying less their chances of reaching the goal/solution are even slimmer. It also prevents cooperation. Even if not direct, looking at someone else's answer can lead you to the right one.
This rule is also impossibly complicated to manage. I mean what is the correct course of action when the right answer is provided with the wrong explanation or the wrong answer with the right explanation or just some weird inbetween. It's just unnecessarily complicated and almost impossible to apply. So just have it as "post the right URL" and leave it at that.
Of course the problem now would be: how to stop spam? Getting to that in a moment...
Besides the problem with that rule I think overall it's better if the contest offers some more interactive help because there seems to be a lot of cases where people are just getting lost and making others lost in the process. The "warm/cold" idea was cute, but not very objective or simple, because it relied on me just making a random judgement call on their random guess; it also requires an explanation to make it easier. So... here's an improved version:
Each riddle is managed by the riddle creator. Each contestant may submit ONE link per hour. Meaning that if you submit more the riddle creator is free to quote and say Ignored to your post for breaking the rule; in which case if anyone else had the same idea as you and posted after you (or posted after the riddle creator labeled the post as Ignored) they will win. If by chance you are declared the winner even though you break the rule nothing happens the situation is just treated as if the rule wasn't borken. In the case of the riddle answer does meet the 1-hour limit the riddle creator will either label it as correct, or give it a hint of "warm" or "cold" based on the first (rule-abyding) answer before it. The first stab at the riddle will only be answered with "incorrect" in case it is indeed is incorect. In case two answers are equal to each other the correct hint for the players is "warm".
Example:
Riddle: Guess the number between 1 and 10. (Answer is 5)
post #1 — 7 incorrect
post #2 — 8 warm
post #3 — 7 warm
post #4 — 9 cold
post #5 — 4 warm
post #6 — 10 cold
post #7 — 6 warm
It may seem like there's a lot of "warm" spam but that's the point. The idea is to correct guesses that lead to nowhere and just waste people's time.
Even if people don't get the warm/cold confirmation they may still post answers, as long as they follow the 1-hour rule. If the riddle owner however doesn't answer them for 1-day then the contest is extended by 1-day. The maximum extention period is 1 week. If the contest owner drops off the face of the earth and the maximum extention period is exceeded the riddle is canceled and may be resumed at a latter date. (this is where the idea of having each riddle in it's own thread comes into play; you close the thread) Of course the contest organizer (ie. you) can act as the riddle owner. As long as answer are given to people at least once a day the extension won't happen. If you fail however the faillback rule applies.
Because of the 1-hour rule, people can't spam. Because of the wam/cold rule people get a lot of help and answers to their guesses.
I think it's better to somehow allow people to make a ton of riddles; that way we don't have a shortage. I submitted what 7? if there's just two people like me you have 14 submissions. Here's one way:
- There are two types of contestants: supporters and players
- Each riddle is worth a base bounty of 100 points
- Players may submit a riddle; should nobody answer correctly they gain the riddle 125 points (regardless of what bounty there is on it) — they may do this only ONCE
- Supporters may enter as many riddles as they wish.
- When you become a supporter you forfeit any winnings on the contest. You may become a supporter while the contest is running, your points until then will simply be discarded. Supporter status can not be undone.
- If a supporter answers a riddle then he doesn't get points, instead the next 5 riddles in line get a fixed bonus of 25 points. These bonuses may stack. The idea here is that even though you're answering the riddle you're not necessarily ruining the contest but instead adding more points to it (+25 points to be exact, if we subtract the base bounty that's lost) and making things more interesting.
- A riddle by a supporter doesn't get answered the same rule of a +25 bonus on all the next ones is applied.
- People are encouraged this way to constantly participate since even if you get a lead it's never clear if someone won't just get ahead of you in one fell swoop. So in a way it's advantageous to solve a riddle even if it doesn't change the current ranking.
Regarding the riddle forging, I think a few simple rules can be applied to make everything at least seem fair, even if by chance it isn't.
Note these don't necessarily apply to all types of riddles; but it should be obvious when they're required. Also they're not necessarily explicit rules you ask people to follow but more like hints you throw out when riddles don't really click together. (what I'm about to write is awfully complicated, for ye' average riddle contest
)
A clear Answer must be provided with the Riddle and every word, symbol and other piece of the answer must have an acceptable equivalent in the riddle. ie. no invisible "walls"
For example. If the riddle involves making a word with certain letter at the end of each sentence, then the answer must explicitly state the process and by consequence the riddle must too! however not necessarily explicitly. So by whatever means the riddle must specify that picking letters is involved and sentences and the end of sentence AND that it's suppose to lead to an answer. So the entire explanation can be as ridelly or abstract as you wish but the bits still have to be there and then END and BEGINNING have to be there as well.
To take another example say the riddle involves instead the sum of some numbers. Normally what we perceive as sum is something like 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5. If that's the riddles "answer" then "1" has to appear, "+" has to appear "1 + 2" has to somehow be linked, and so on to achieve a beginning-to-ending kind of interpretation. However that's not necessarily the case, the answer could use "Sum of the list 1, 2, 3, 4, 5" in which case only the hint towards sum and an interpretation of a list has to appear.
Whichever the case, the answer and riddle must draw a perfect parallel. An answer that does not use (adequately) riddle information is useless. eg. "if you draw a circle and triangle over the random babel in these places it all makes sense!" or a probably more common mistake is to give people hints at random "blocks" with out giving them a framework or even hint at how to work with those blocks.
The riddles has to be solvable by anyone. What this means is that if the riddle by any chance happens to require some kind of "experience" knowledge such as being present and active in a certain forum section or
knowing of a certain thing happened.
Specifically this goes alone the lines of: if you never been there, or known of it are there hints to find it and is it searchable? Generally threads should focus on the title and not the contents (even if one reflects the other, the riddle hints should focus on the title), forums should reflect on their over-arching mission/content so that you don't have to be "a part of it" to know it.
Limit on really old shows should happen. I think something like allow anything that is a Tv series from this year (ie. NOT OVA and NOT Movie, among other things) and place a restriction of "this popular on this chart" for everything else. You can probably use MyAnimeList for that. Anything that's above a certain ranking should be good enough that most people have a fair chance to get it. Even if they didn't necessarily watched it if it's popular there's a good chance they have either seen a lot of artwork for it or heard about from other people.
To make it even more foolproof you could limit it just broad show element. One way to verify that is to just ask for 2 images (2 so there's less chance of original art) portraying the element in the show the riddle is referring to. Easy enough—if the show is not obscure anyway.