Design cotnests in our forum

As you can check in the contests forum lately webdigity is hosting many design contests. This thing helped the community much as the money incentive bringed in many members, and some of them became regular contributors to the community.

This fact was mentioned by many of my clients who now want new logos designed by our professional designers from the contests. This means that we are able to have one design contest open for the next few months.

What is your opinion on that? Please vote to the poll and let us know why you think we should or should not keep on hosting design contests.

Thanks in advance for your replies :)

yes keep the contests but the time until the contest ends should not be so long ~ 3 weeks is enough (will say after 3 weeks has to be a winner)

Yes you are right about that.

The next one will be for 2-3 weeks

The design contests are a great way to attract new members to our community. For the customer this is probably the best way to get their design work done: pay once and have several different designers work on the project, how much better can it get for them?
This could also generate a nice little profit for the site, I think a $10 to $25 contest-hosting-fee would be very reasonable...

yes if this is paid by the one who needs the logo ;)

I think its a great idea but it needs to be organized better. It needs some type of a gallery so people dont have to read all the posts and stuff, the topics become to long to read (for me).

yes thats true, if you join after the first week you need to check a lot

That's a great idea! It will require some work to do it as a module, but I guess it will worth it.

Thanks for the heads up Silent. You will get credit for that ;)

Any contest in a forum is only good for me :)

If you are creating a module for it you should also add some sort of 'contest winner badge' to display with the profile.

that sounds great (designing thos badge could be a contest too)

Yeah, that's true because after so many attempts I am sure that I can't design one....

Funny, I came over here to suggest a gallery type page too - stupid dial up often has me avoiding what is usually an interesting thread. Oh well, great minds think alike. :)

If you open up the contest area to others, you may end up with some of the thieving that goes on over at Sitepoint. I would strongly suggest a post count (fairly high) or some other sort of qualification prior to allowing folks to have a contest. When the site owner holds the contest (and one that has the reputation that you do), participants are going to feel more secure that not only will their design not be stolen and used (as in I didn't like any of them and then secretly use it anyway) or simply not paying.

Yeah in any way none will be able to start a contest. I will keep monitoring contests and make sure that none is scamming people around. Maybe I will get the contest money from those who want to start a contest before it starts.

I had thought about that as an option, maybe you could charge some sort of handling fee to allow for any fees (Paypal or whoever) and a little extra for your time. Wasn't sure you wanted to get into that business though. It also could put you at some financial risk as it seems PayPal (don't know about others) is often quick to give refunds without seriously questioning what actually happened.

Thats a good idea, just to be sure with new people