Okay, here is the topic which won for the contest starting Saturday, January 4, 2020:

Best Personal Photo/Drawing/Fractal of 2019. Let each member resubmit their personal favorite of the past year.

Here is the problem:

Accepting entries until 01/24/20 5:15 ( 19 days )
You must be logged in and have and have uploaded an image since the contest topic was chosen in order to enter the contest.

How do we enter the contest with our personal favorite of the past year when the image can only be used if it was uploaded after the start of the contest on 01/04/2020????

Each member should have the entire year of 2019 to choose their entry. That was the plan. Not images submitted in 2020.
A Mod will have to change it so entries from 2019 can be resubmitted or I guess we could copy our choice and resubmit it as a new entry.

It's a great contest idea but I suspected there may be a problem because of this...don't know if mods can do anything, might be caedes only to re-calibrate things...so...here's an idea...choose your favorite of 2019, make some little change to it, then re-upload it as a rework and it should be an eligible entry:)...and if caedes doesn't change it I would suggest moving this discussion to another board so more would see it or let ppl know what to do so they can enter.

Hi all, I've been sick for a few days and I'm sorry I missed this - we have no ability to change how the entries are qualified, that can only be done by Caedes himself. I would suggest either re-uploading the same image as Pat suggested, or going with whatever the 2nd-choice option was as the contest category.

Well, Tick, you submitted the topic on 12/30/2019 and outlined your topic as follows, "Best Personal Photo/Drawing/Fractal of 2019. Let each member resubmit their personal favorite of the past year."

No ambiguity with that. I would have thought that if it could not have been done, someone would have mentioned it before now, 01/07/2020, and before it won the poll and two entries posted.

I thought it was pretty clear John. I'm anxious to see more entries.

I just wish the vote tally could be made public on the entries, like they do to decide the winner of the contest ideas/suggestions.

I have always wondered why the contest vote tallies were not made public. As you mentioned, the contest ideas/suggestions has a running total. Our images have totals in "Views, Downloads, and Favs." Why not total votes being shown for the contests? Sounds like a great idea to me.

The contests have pretty clear rules for entries - if your proposed idea falls outside of those rules, you should contact someone to review it. Please do not count on it being seen by any of the mods or Caedes, we do not check things like that because we expect that the proposals will be within the guidelines.

We may vote on topics ourselves, but while I can't speak for anyone else, I did not have a lot of time to spend on the site during the open voting and putting in a topic vote was not my priority when I was here.

As far as the vote tallies - if you hover over the shaded bar you should get a rollover reply that tells you the number of votes for the topic.

"As far as the vote tallies - if you hover over the shaded bar you should get a rollover reply that tells you the number of votes for the topic."

It was mentioned in the comments above that you COULD see the vote tally on the shaded bar. The vote tally that cannot be seen is with the contest candidates themselves. We place our vote on five and then see the selection that wins. It is that tally in question. How many votes did each competitors' image receive. I would like to know if that tally is possible to be shared with us. Maybe run a shaded bar below the title of each entry. We could watch, in real time, how the vote was going.

The current contest is not outside the rules. All each person has to do is re-post their favorite image from 2019. The Mods don't have to do anything.
Like John said, we know the votes the ideas/suggestions for the contest receives. What we don't know is how many votes !st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th received respectively. Someone must know or there wouldn't be any way to determine the winner. Unless of course, that's not the way the winner is determined.

So I didn't think the mods could do anything about the contest setup, only caedes can, but the mods can approve or reject images...normally, I don't believe we are supposed to post the same image more than once unless a rework has been done but perhaps an exception might be made in this case so the contest theme can run smoothly...to go with the 2nd choice in the poll would further confuse things for people...there are already 2 contest entries unchanged from the original so perhaps just let everyone do that?...as for the contest polls, how many votes the entries get etc. here again, I think only caedes could change the setup on that...maybe he'll look in on this discussion and take it into consideration...and another idea John mentioned on another discussion board was it would be an idea if we could enter more than one image in any given contest...I remember years ago you could enter 2 images and back then the site was a lot more active than it is today...these days there are some contests that just barely get the needed 5 entries to vote on so being able to enter more than one image would help with that.

I apologize, I missed that you were talking about the actual entries and not the poll topic. I think the first thing that Geri would want to know before considering such a change is: How would this be a useful or interesting thing for people to know, and what your considerations are for the issues that might occur if people could see this information.

Ron, unfortunately the current contest is explicitly outside the rules because in order to have an entry, people need to violate the CoC (which is why I am good with Pat's suggestion of making some edits before re-uploading).

Please review the Code of Conduct, the specific problem is here in section 2E:

� Once an image has been uploaded to the site it should not be uploaded again unless substantial changes have been made to it. These changes should be enough so that it could be reasonably assumed that the resulting changed image would receive a better critique than the previous version.

I beg to differ with your reasoning. If I have to make changes to the photo, then it is different then what was posted in 2019 and outside the scope of the 2019 Personal Favorite contest. You were a little late in deciding against this contest. Yes, I read where you were indisposed, but you surely aren't the only Mod available.

Ron, that's the original point that I was making. The contest topic would have required changes to the way that the contests function. Topic voting is not something that we monitor as we expect that people are aware of the eligibility rules and are proposing topics that fit within those rules, and this is one of the very few topics that would have been an issue. So, no, I'm not the only mod, but what I'm saying is that you should not be expecting ANY mod to catch that you have proposed a topic that required re-programming the contest entry requirements or breaking site rules to enter. If we happen to catch it - great. But it's not a guarantee, and it didn't happen here.

I'll consult with the other mods, but if you don't want to make changes to the image as it was, I think the leeway we can extend is that you'll have to take down the original post and this is a one-time pass for people to re-upload the previous image due to a good faith error.

Seems silly to me to take down the original post to skirt the rules. It's beginning to resemble the political scene. Either approve the current contest or move on; it's just a small problem in a big world.

This is an interesting enough contest topic that I think it is reasonable for us to be lenient with the "no re-uploads" rule. Since this is probably not a common case, I don't think it is worth the effort to change the contest programming code, but I think we can work around the issues easily enough.

- You can re-upload an image only for the purposes of this contest.

- The newly uploaded image must be identical to the original.

- You must leave the original image in the gallery (so we know that it was indeed uploaded in 2019.

- It would be nice if you provided a link from the new image to the original image.

Thank you very much for allowing the "2019 Personal Favorite" contest to continue as suggested.

I appreciate it very much and agree a link to the original should be included.

Thanks, Geri, much appreciated.

Great news! Thank you, Geri!

I did add my golfing logo to the repost. If that is a violation, I will repost.