As you may already know, Programmers.SE will soon hold it's first ever, site-wide contest. However, there is one more thing we need community input on: prizes.
So, until Thursday, at 20:00 UTC, we will be accepting recommendations for incentives. But:
It has to be a book.
Keep it in a reasonab...
@AnnaLear People don't want books (see the comments on the question). They have a point: most books that are going to win are already owned by most Programmers.
@Jae Gift cards are a no go. It's kinda like giving away cash for content and that's not what we want to do. Prizes should be less about the explicit value and more about being something that's cool to have; some neat thing that provides just enough value to make the contest interesting.
Books might turn out to be tricky since they can be pricey. How many we can award will depend on which books you guys choose and how many you want to give out per week.
I'm still not sold on this idea of choosing from a list of books. I'm looking at the top list now, and I suspect that a lot of people have Pragmatic Programmer, Code Complete, and Clean Code. In fact, out of the list of suggested books now, there are only three that I don't own - Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, The Practice of Programming, and Introduction to Algorithms.
Might it be better to allocate a number of prizes and dollar values, and the winner of each section can choose any book equal to or less than that value?
user20683
4:57 PM
@ThomasOwens I think that makes a fair bit of sense.
@WorldEngineer Especially when you consider the audience of Programmers. There's a lot of different people with different interests. Of the books that I mentioned I don't have, there's none that would incite me to participate since I don't want any of them. But I'm also sure that there aren't a ton of people who want books on Lean Software Development or software engineering management or empirical software engineering.
@ThomasOwens I think that's reasonable. The main thing that'll determine the budget then would be how many books (total, over the run time of the contest) you want to give out.
One thing we can't really do is make it a "pick anything from Amazon within this $$ range" kind of thing. This has to be related to Programmers' scope.
And @AnnaLear, I'd suspect that. But I'd also like to see this as an opportunity to improve Programmers. I just think that offering books that most target users own (or have otherwise read) might not be the greatest incentive. Thoughts, @Jae?
Again, that's rather restrictive to O'Reilly Books. They aren't too heavy on the architecture, process, and software management side of things. Don't forget - not everyone who uses Programmers writes code (at least at work).
I was thinking much easier. The best answer winner gets $n and the best question winner gets $m that can be applied to anything equal to or less than that in value.
So, hypothetically, I won best answer with a prize of $50. I could ask for anything on Amazon that costs no more than $50 as long as it's relevant to Programmers.
user20683
6:46 PM
easy way to do that would be link to wish list and stack buys that one thing
@Jae It's not really up to us to evaluate prizes... as in, we'd rather not get involved at that level of detail. This is why I'm trying to nail down a possible list of prizes.
We have guidelines for picking the winners per the contest rules. I say after we pick the winners, a mod could mod-message them to let them know and see what they want. I would suspect a mod would be able to make the decision, and I have no problem supporting that.
In my mind, the prizes should be almost secondary to the whole thing. The goal *ideally( would be to make Programmers a better place, and get a bit of an incentive as a side bonus.
Oh yeah, for sure. But the incentive has to actually matter.
I just looked at some cubes of coworkers, and I see a lot of these books in people's cubes. If our target audience has them, there's no incentive to participate, and therefore nothing happens.
@Jae @ThomasOwens's idea? I think that could work. Keep in mind that we get copied on all mod messages - if you could work things out via email or something, that'd be a bit nicer to our mailboxes. :)
Mods can see emails, but I'm not sure if they have to be valid emails.
So just because someone has one doesn't mean it's theirs. However, I'd suspect that the people being contacted would have legitimate accounts with real emails.
@ThomasOwens That's easy enough to handle, we just make a Meta post warning all participants to use valid emails if they want to be eligible, and if one of the winners doesn't and fails to respond, then, well, I get their prize...
@ThomasOwens When we finalize everything, we could do a Meta post warning people that in case they win they'll be getting mod messages. We can also ask them to put something in their about box, like "I'm participating in the contest", Gaming did something similar...
My understand is that we hold the contest. Every week, we pick the best question and best answer in the category using the rules described. Once we have a winner, a mod (me) will look at the profile of the winner and send them an email. They can then go to Amazon (or does the retailer not matter?) and choose items totaling up to the prize amount. They reply with that and if it's within the price range and appropriate for Programmers, I forward it off to Stack Exchange and they get their prize.
Cool, as described I don't see why we should be excluded, but if one of us is just because he helped winners pick prizes, then we should all be excluded, it would be unfair to only exclude the one helping...
@Jae No, that's irrelevant. I was only asking for mods because we'd be involved in privately contacting users about specific prizes and such. It's no reason for us to be ineligible, but since it involves behind the scenes communication, people may not like it.
My understand is that we hold the contest. Every week, we pick the best question and best answer in the category using the rules described. Once we have a winner, a mod (me) will look at the profile of the winner and send them an email. They can then go to Amazon (or does the retailer not matter?) and choose items totaling up to the prize amount. They reply with that and if it's within the price range and appropriate for Programmers, I forward it off to Stack Exchange and they get their prize.
The prize amount is supposedly $50 including shipping and handling.
@Aarthi We solved that. Users have to have a valid email on file (we will warn them of that). And they have would also have a 3-4 day time limit to respond, or else the runner-up gets the prrize.
Wait! Programmers.SE is having a contest!?
What have you been living under a rock?
Just kidding (maybe). Yes, Programmers is having a contest. And it's going to be awesome!
So how will this contest work?
The contest will be divided into 4 weeks. For each of the 4 weeks, there will be a tag d...
As you may already know, Programmers.SE will soon hold it's first ever, site-wide contest. However, there is one more thing we need community input on: prizes.
So, until Thursday, at 20:00 UTC, we will be accepting recommendations for incentives. But:
It has to be a book.
Keep it in a reasonab...
