Programmers.SE Contest: New Proposal [closed]

Question

The last celebration proposal we had never got off of it's feet. In fact, the Birthday Celebration Proposal's time has come, and it left a long time ago. So a few other P.SE members and I came up with an idea: let's have a contest!

We realize that other sites that have had contests have had a lot of support, and the community didn't have to do too much of the dirty work. But that's the beauty of it. If we follow through with something like this, we will get more publicity and support from higher powers.

We have, somewhat, became the ugly little brother of Stack Overflow. We have had to rebuild, and clean up the mess from the early days of P.SE, before the revolution. A lot of other sites did too, but most are done. Mainly because they had SE backing them up. Or a CHAOS member.

That's why this contest will be great. We, as a community, will set the entire thing up, give it to SE, and let them serve it up. Overall, this is going to give us:

• A stronger community.
• More "power users".
• A fun activity.
• More executive support from SE

because they saw that we put it together ourselves.

If you agree with any of these ideas please upvote. If you disagree, please downvote.

If you have an idea, please post it as an answer to this question. Structure it in the same (or similar) format as I did. If you want to edit my idea, do the same.

---

And the winner is... Rachel!

We will implement this contest as soon as possible. Hope everybody has a little fun and we can help the whole community. Thanks to everyone who voted and submitted ideas!

Answer 1

I think a better way to approach it might be like how Gaming.SE does their contests

You start by picking a timeframe and a tag. The tag could be a design pattern, a development methodology, or any broad category you'd like to promote.

There are two winners: One for best question, and one for best answer.

Best Question is won by the person who asked a question with the contest tag within the contest timeframe, that has the most Views.

Best Answer is won by the the person who answered a question containing the contest tag within the contest timeframe, that has the most votes.

Winners get the software development Book or eBook of their choice (within a reasonable price range) from Amazon

The beauty of this is users don't have to do anything extra to participate in the contest, and very little administrative work is needed to manage the contest. You'll need someone to determine the contest tags and timeframe, and create the announcement for it, and you'll need someone that knows how to get the top question and answer based on the criteria mentioned above (I'm not sure if that can be done with SE's search, or if you'd need the help of an SE employee to query the database)

Other than that, it's just regular SE Q&A. The only difference is users are encouraged to post questions and answers within a specific tag to win prizes.

As an added bonus, you will be promoting tags which are clearly on-topic for the site, such as design-patterns or algorithms, and this will hopefully generate some great on-topic questions and answers for P.SE, which I think we need more of.

EDIT

Per discussions in the programmers contest chat room, the final decision was to run a contest for a 4-week period, with one tag being highlighted per week.

The tags will be programming-history, data-structures, algorithms, and documentation

At the end of each week, two prizes will be awarded:

• The Best Question prize will be awarded to the user who asked the question with the most views in the contest tag during that tag's contest week (so feel free to advertise your question any way you can to get more views!)

• The Best Answer prize will be awarded to the user who posted the answer with the most votes that was answered to any question with one the contest tags during that tag's contest week

Prizes will be determined by the SE team, and as of right now it looks like they will be $50 worth of programming-related stuff from Amazon (winners choice!)

Prizes will only be awarded to open questions, so be sure what you post is on-topic for the site.

Answer 2

Answer all the things

How this would work:

1. We set up a contest chat room,
2. We answer previously unanswered questions, and post our answers to the chat room.
3. Highest voted answer on a previously unanswered questions win the super awesome prize!
4. Contest lasts for a month.

Clarifications:

1. Unanswered means no answers at all, but we can work something out for questions that have no positively scored answers (a volunteer should verify).
2. Obviously, eligible questions must have been posted before the contest starts, as every new question is essentially unanswered.

Answer 3

The Great Programmers.SE User Fest

What the goal is:

• To create more site activity.
• To give existing users a more enjoyable time.

What we do:

• Throughout a 2 week period, we find the following things:

  • Best Question (based on views)

  • Best Answer (based on votes)

  • Best Editors (most edits in certain time)

  • Best Rep Racker (user with most rep in certain time)

  • Any other idea that I get from comments...

At the end of the contest, incentives will be given to the winners.

Answer 4

The great Stack Overflow treasure hunt

How this would work:

1. We set up a contest chat room;
2. We explore the vast wilderness that is Stack Overflow for questions that rightfully belong to us;
3. If we find a great question we post it to the chat room;
4. People periodically check the chat room and if they agree the questions are more suitable for Programmers they vote to migrate;
5. Whoever salvages more questions wins the super awesome prize.

The rules:

1. No crap. If it's closed on Stack Overflow, it's crap.
2. No old questions, nothing older than three months. You can always post them in the chat room, but they won't count towards the big prize.
3. No flags, no need to bother the SO mods with our contest, just post the questions you find in the chat room.
4. Contest period: A month.

What we gain:

1. Super awesome questions (hopefully)
2. The immense satisfaction of stealing the questions from Stack Overflow.

One volunteer from the community will be responsible for counting each user's salvaged questions.

Answer 5

This is my proposal:

• A panel of judges is chosen (volunteers).
• Each week, the judges make picks on certain topics (best answer, best question, most edits, etc.). Of course, some of these topics may not even need judges.
• We do this for about 4 weeks.
• Incentives are given to winners at the end of the month.

Answer 6

Here is my proposal:

• Each week a new tag or general topic is chosen.
• Throughout the week, questions using the tag that want to be part of the contest will be marked with a special [contest] tag.
• At the end of the week, the questions with the most upvotes (or some other kind of feedback) will go into a "final round".
• After a certain amount of weeks, the community will vote on the 3 questions they thought helped the community the most, and 3 answers that they thought were the most helpful.
• Winners will receive some form of incentive.

Answer 7

The great tag wiki edit

How this would work:

1. Set up a contest time frame and chat room,
2. discuss and evaluate tag wiki edits submitted during time frame set,
   _{in order to short-list ones to be presented in nominees list at next step,}
3. set up a "voting question" with nominees list (like elections town hall or SCNA wish list),
4. whoever edit scores best gets kissed by Anna Lear and Mark Trapp wins.

The rules:

1. No edits outside the time frame.
2. Contest period: A month.

What we gain:

1. tag wiki improvements
2. more publicity
3. better understanding of Tag Wiki best practices

---

Background

• definition from page with a really nice title: 'tag-wiki' tag wiki - Meta Stack Overflow

  An editable page that briefly summarizes the topic of the tag and that may provide links to existing questions that are often useful to many people...

  Tag wikis are made of 2 parts:

  • The Excerpt - which is displayed on question lists and tag hover menu.
  • The Body - which contains detailed information about a tag wiki.

• definition that inspired me, from a tag homepage/FAQ request at MSO:

  a community-wiki editable home page... where we could place essentially the tag-specific FAQ and other tag-specific links

Answer 8

I propose we do something a little more different than business as usual.

In honor of April Fools Day, we have a Foolish question contest. To avoid disrupting the site, we post the questions on Meta, labeled with the Fool tag. The goal is to ask the worst questions related or tenuously related to programming.

For example, "Should qBits be renamed to mechicka booleans?".

Whoever gets the most downvotes wins. The prize is to be deleted last in the structured tag cleanup that immediately follows.