... However... note that for the Photo Contest questions, links to the photo contests, either from the Meta question
photo.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7109/new-photo-contest, or from each's contest's self-link, there's a "?answertab=active#tab-top" (sort by active) URL query appended. If you arrived at a Photo Contest page by one of those links, then your site sort preferences are changed to "sort by active" (because the preference is persistent across the site).