Programmers.SE Contest

user41796

16:18

My vote is "sure, why not?" Contests can always be fun.

user41796

oh, and can we have hats for it? ;-)

Dynamic

16:54

@GlenH7 Not sure about hats...

:P

But glad to see that you're interested.

user41796

18:04

@Dynamic MUST.HAVE.HATS! And horrible punctuation.

user41796

Some straw man topics... Testing; programming languages (not sure how to capture the tag for this one); code quality; design

user41796

@Dynamic - I pinned your mod request over on the whiteboard. Hopefully that will catch one or more of them. Otherwise, ping 'em directly in WB

user41796

And I'm going to suggest security as another topic for this year's contest.

Dynamic

@GlenH7 I'm trying not to get on anybodys nerves.

user41796

@Dynamic is that in regards to security or pinging the mods?

Dynamic

18:16

@GlenH7 Pinging the mods.

So do you think that we should run the same type of contest as last year?

user41796

ok. In that case, I would say don't worry about getting on their nerves. All of them are busy, so you need to explicitly call them out by their handle in order to get their attention. It would only be getting on their nerves if you repeatedly did so

user41796

And I had envisioned something similar to last year, but am open to new ideas as well. At a minimum, using different tag topics will keep it more interesting

Dynamic

@GlenH7 That's definitely the smallest change I would make. I'd also like to see something like what Super User did:

Super User Blog: Super User’s 2nd Birthday Super Contest

nhinkle on August 19, 2011

It’s already been two years now that Super User has been running, and we’ve come a long way. We still continue to provide as an excellent source for questions and answers to the online community for anything computer related. We have also added the new officially blessed blog and had our very first community elections for moderators where we added 4 new moderators bringing us to a total of 8 moderators!

Update: the contest has ended! The judges are hard at work deciding the winners – expect the official results within a week. Thanks to everyone who participated in Super User during the contest! …

user41796

OTOH, it may be possible to structure things for "meta" aspects of the site. That tends to be more exclusive though as not everyone can freely up / down vote; flag; review; etc....

user41796

looks like I should say "jynx" there

Dynamic

18:21

Not sure what you mean by that. Care to elaborate?

user41796

I think that would work too. I'll note the somewhat exclusive aspects of it. But beyond mentioning it, being exclusive wouldn't bother me at all

user41796

read it a bit more closely, so I'll retract some of my comment. They seemed to rely upon edits and league reputation earned

user41796

which are pretty much free-for-all meta aspects

user41796

I had been thinking along the lines of "most review" activity and what not, which is exclusive based upon rep level

Dynamic

@GlenH7 I believe the idea there is to reward users who were doing good for the site before any mention a contest, not just because the contest began.

user41796

18:26

I can see that aspect, yes.

Dynamic

I also like the idea of a themed contest the way Android.SE does it...

user41796

link?

Dynamic

10

Q: Android Food Fight Winners!

Ice Cream Sandwich was the clear winner, with over 5 times the page views as Gingerbread! As for individual winners... In the Ice Cream Sandwich tag: The prize for the most viewed question goes to eldarerathis, for asking What actually happens when you swipe an app out of the recent apps l...

discussion

user41796

Seems pretty similar to how last year's contest was run except they had the benefit of punnery from Android OS code names. :-)

Dynamic

@GlenH7 Yeah that's actually where we got the idea from

If you look here:

5

A: Do we need to rethink our site promotions and contests?

I definitely agree that these are valid concerns. One of our biggest challenges is finding promotions that have an effect. It seems like we've found ways to generate a temporary spike in questions, but that doesn't necessarily translate into users that stick around. Our theory was that if you gen...

It shows all of the contests they've done.

Very similar to what we did.

user41796

18:36

@Dynamic I happened to be skimming over that same post and was about to post it here

Dynamic

Beat you to it ;P

What about a language wars type of thing?

We can get some people to write up a blog post for a few popular languages and then tie that in to tags...

Actually I can see that getting Not Constructive really fast.

user41796

My general thought was to allow "programming languages" as a category, but we would need to specify additional tags that would qualify if the programming_languages wasn't used

user41796

but that could get ugly quickly.

Dynamic

That was what I was thinking.

I still like the Super User idea. The only drawback to that is that I think a few people might win everything.

There are <20 truly active users.

Take a look at this:

stackexchange.com/promos

user41796

I was starting to wonder about effectiveness of drawing in new users to the site

Dynamic

18:45

Drawing new users is different than drawing in new, quality users.

user41796

A number of the top questions / answers are from regular, high-rep users. That's not necessarily bad, but it kind of defeats drawing in new users

Dynamic

Definitely

Still, new users is generally a good thing.

This is awesome:

stackexchange.com/promos/5/the-new-ipad-is-here

user41796

color me jealous

Dynamic

I want to do that!!

The only problem is what would we give away?

Grand prize could be a nice laptop ;)

user41796

lol. I think there's quite a bit of value in keeping the prizes low-key. High value prizes only attract skullduggery.

Dynamic

19:04

Haha you've gotta admit that'd be nice though :P

The problem is we aren't stack overflow... we don't have the audience or scope.

Yannis Rizos

in The Whiteboard, 2 hours ago, by Dynamic

Can I get a mod to discuss a possible contest with me over in the contest chat room? http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/2654/programmers-se-contest

@Dynamic What's up?

user41796

@Dynamic Oh, it would be awesome, no doubt. But it's way too easy to game the SE system. And a high value prize would only serve to encourage people to game the system.

Dynamic

@Yannis Ive got a few questions. Do you have time?

Yannis Rizos

@Dynamic Yeah, I was planning to go out for a loooong walk, and it just started raining.

Dynamic

@GlenH7 If the people who are working for that high value prize are adding quality content to the site then its a good thing :P

Yannis Rizos

19:09

So, I'm here, without anything interesting to do. Entertain me!

Dynamic

@Yannis Ha alright. First of all it looks like we have community support for another contest... would it be possible to do one again? I mean is SE willing to back us up?

Yannis Rizos

No idea, I haven't asked.

Dynamic

What's your opinion on another contest?

Yannis Rizos

I don't think the first one worked, no significant increase in traffic. But, it was fun and... well... hm... I won ;)

Another thing is that traffic is going to slow down a lot during the summer. If we do this, perhaps it would make more sense to do it on September?

Dynamic

IMO the last one didn't work because it was geared more towards current users.

It'll probably take a while to plan anyways depending on how we want to do this.

Yannis Rizos

19:17

and what's your ideas about targeting newer users?

user20683

I think September is a good time, that's when the network gets inundated with desperates trying to do their homework.

Dynamic

Here's the thing: Programmers.SE has a completely different scope compared to other tech sites on the network. For example, Arqade can take advantage of new game and console releases and Aneroid.SE and Ask Different can take advantage of hardware/software releases. We need to find something to take advantage of

user20683

@Dynamic it's like doing a contest for math or physics

user20683

and we have a broad range as well

Dynamic

@World But we cant do specific languages can we? That's SO territory.

user20683

19:24

@Dynamic SO tends to be divided into language camps

user41796

@Dynamic if it's a conceptual programming question involving the language, then it's perfectly on-topic for for P.SE.

Dynamic

@World So what can we do? What can we create a contest around?

user20683

hmm

user41796

@Dynamic asked a different way; what all can we measure?

Dynamic

@Glen I'm not worried about what we can measure so much as what "brand" (for lack of a better word) is the event going to carry.

Yannis Rizos

19:28

@Dynamic Have you taken a look at any other sites' events for inspiration?

Dynamic

@Yannis Yup... that's where I got the idea to do a themed contest.

For example if we geared the contest around a new langauge or platform release, we would probably get a lot more questions that belong on SO therefore defeating the purpose

user20683

here's an idea

user20683

time it to one of the big conferences

user20683

where algorithms will be discussed

user20683

that puts it firmly in our territory

Dynamic

19:35

Example?

user20683

The annual ACM Siggraph conference

Yannis Rizos

@WorldEngineer Yes, but... what's the point? When, for example, there's a new Ubuntu release, AskUbuntu sees an influx of new users asking for that new release. That doesn't happen with us and conferences.

user20683

true

user20683

was just a thought

Yannis Rizos

I think the "theme" idea simply doesn't work.

user20683

19:36

I tend to spew out ideas and see what sticks as you well know

Dynamic

@Yannis I think you're right

Yannis Rizos

@WorldEngineer And a good idea it was, it's the closer we could get to a related event. I just think the whole approach of tying the contest to an outside event won't work for ProgSE, due to the nature of the site.

user20683

@YannisRizos yeah

user20683

the conference idea would work better on CS or TCS

Yannis Rizos

Perhaps the better idea is to just target the start of the semester (late Sep, early Oct)... But then again, I'm not 100% certain I want an influx of students...

user41796

19:40

what are some areas we're wanting P.SE to expand into? For example, Hoffa would obviously love to see more Haskell related Q's.

Yannis Rizos

Also, traffic is not really a concern, we are growing nicely. Perhaps we could target the contest to getting better content instead of moar users. Or more diverse content as @GlenH7 just mentioned.

Dynamic

meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/5961/… Gnat had some good ideas in his comment here:

Yannis Rizos

And by better content, I don't just mean new stuff... Improving old stuff could be part of the contest.

Dynamic

@Yannis or rewarding users that do that consistently like Super User did in their contest

Super User Blog: Super User’s 2nd Birthday Super Contest

nhinkle on August 19, 2011

It’s already been two years now that Super User has been running, and we’ve come a long way. We still continue to provide as an excellent source for questions and answers to the online community for anything computer related. We have also added the new officially blessed blog and had our very first community elections for moderators where we added 4 new moderators bringing us to a total of 8 moderators!

Update: the contest has ended! The judges are hard at work deciding the winners – expect the official results within a week. Thanks to everyone who participated in Super User during the contest! …

I like that idea actually @yannis @world @glen

user20683

yeah

user41796

19:48

something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. :-P

Dynamic

Why not? ;)

user41796

old == clean-up / improvement to the site

user41796

new == expanded content (aka Haskell or FP for Hoffa + disciples)

user41796

borrowed == ?

user20683

new = good question, borrowed = find good migrates

user41796

19:49

blue == ?

user20683

blue = meta

user20683

since mods are blue

user20683

;)

Dynamic

Haha that's actually a really good idea

user41796

blue meaning true blue? some means to reward more active users who have been on the site for a while?

Dynamic

19:52

I'll write up my ideas based on your proposition @Glen and the we will edit them from there. At least then it will be more organized.

user41796

Sure

user41796

SuperUser mentioned something about flagging activity (#8, I think). Is it worth considering comment clean-up? Did I just anger the diamonds with the potential increase in work-load that would create? Can SE assign temp-diamonds to help with that work-load?

Dynamic

Maybe. Yes. I highly doubt it. ;)

Yannis Rizos

@GlenH7 If you are going to purge all the comments, I might consider letting you use my login credentials for a week or two...

user41796

@YannisRizos mwah ha ha ha. :-) And I'd be happy letting you steal credit for that....

Dynamic

21:45

@YannisRizos @GlenH7 @WorldEngineer So far I have this:

docs.google.com/document/d/…

That's almost identical to this: blog.superuser.com/2011/08/19/…

On top of that, to draw in good content, I wanted to do something like this:

stackexchange.com/promos/11/windows-8-challenge

But that's probably too much.

Thoughts?

Transcript for

Programmers.SE Contest