My only concern with the scoring... is that my (and probably many other's) opinion on which question is the best, won't necessarily line up with the number of upvotes the question gets.

As in... I relatively rarely use "potential popularity" as a guideline for writing challenges... usually it's "I think this is a cool topic I should make a challenge about it."

This is interesting. I like the "what can you do with two random tags" concept, but I think I'm leaning more toward Martin's position: it would be better to allow feedback & editing rather than making it a competition with a time-crunch.

As an analogy, I'm thinking of NaNoWriMo. It's ostensibly about writing a 50,000-word novel in a month, but I've seen many writers say that at best it's about writing a first draft in a month, with many rounds of editing required afterward to make it any good. The time constraint is a motivator and a fun challenge, but the results are garbage, um, diamonds in the rough.

@ГригорийПерельман I'm busy with real life stuff for at least a month. :/

I might have the time to make a challenge at some point, but possibly not the energy.

seems like a cool idea but i worry about the logistics. how do you ensure someone gets their tags at the precise moment they have X hours available? when is the actual deadline? what is the prize?

May I join the contest?

@SIGSEGV I think all you need to do is edit the page and add your name in

What does "List of users to invite" mean then?

Not entirely sure. It could just be notes of who they'd like to specifically ask to do this.

@devRicher People who have been really good at writing challenges in the past. We definitely wanted to see if they wanted to participate.

@quintopia Time starts at the precise moment they get their tags, not set, upvotes.

We could do a multi-stage competition: X hours to post a challenge to the sandbox, followed by Y hours to post it to the main site (and/or forfeit). Basically requiring people to "take it slow" and allowing some feedback/filtering to occur (along the lines of "this is ready for main," "this needs more work," or "this will be a trainwreck don't post it").

I think I can win

All my recent successful challenges are made from scratch

(Without sandbox!)

@ГригорийПерельман so basically the competitor will say "give me my tags at time X, " the associated deadline will be recorded, and someone will check that the challenge was posted by that time?