My suggestion you need to be bold of giving the timeline when it started and when it ended, since the celebration is 14th next month, I would suggest the contest will start from February 14th to March 14th, one month is enough.

In the previous contest, you're asking it's need at least 10 members to join for the contest will be valid. I would suggest you should run the contest regardless how many participants joined. Let's say only 9 members join, it's not fun if the contest will not be valid and no one will win.

Another suggestion you should offer the prize able to convert to Bitcoin, some people who have high privacy don't want to get collectible.

My feedback:

• I think you was started it in low visibility board, Meta board should be better to start (like 10th anniversary forum contest was).
• Since cooking is mostly a female (or feminine male, lol) favorite activity, their kitchen is bound to get messy if real men are required to get creative in the kitchen. Maybe you should write a provision like, "if you're a man, involve your female partner to create the work".

Regardless, it's gonna be another amazing contest, can't say for sure myself but I'll try my best to enter your vontest this time.

Can’t cook for shit , but I’d give it a go 

Will be happy to give this one a shot, and btw the other contest you mentioned was a success because ample time was given, secondly, the community showed support through forum nuggets which might have attracted so much participation and the visibility bump the contest got from the news ticker contributed to its success. Besides, you know the saying “ you get things right the first time. Others the second...But the third time, they say is the charm” maybe the second try could be your charm, shoot your shot mate

I've been thinking for a while regarding the small set of rules that could be implemented for the contest to be based on... Considering the community feedback, this is the set of assumptions I'm currently considering:

Rules:

• Pie must be made by yourself and the theme should be Bitcoin related (you could even include a homage to bitcointalk ).
• In order to be qualified you should post a picture containing your homemade pie + a piece of paper with your username and date;
• Only 1 entry per user (you're free to include any number of pies on your picture);
• Competition will be held in two phases:
  
  • 1st Phase - From 14th February to 14th of March : This is where all the users are free to submit their entries;
  • 2nd Phase - Voting process from 15th of March to 19th of March. Winner shall be announced on the 20th of March. I believe that the voting should be made by means of MERITING, but I'm willing to discuss this with the community (also, another thread would be made);
• The prize would be distributed according to the following quantity: 1st Winner would get 60 % of the price pool, 2nd winner 30 % and the 3rd one would get 10 %;
• Accounts prior to a certain date are excluded from taking part on the contest;
• No minimum entries for the contest to run;

Prize:

• Passport Foundation Batch 2 Trezor Model One -> Replaced by BTC only (to preserve users identity/personal information). As of now, the total size of the pot is the following:

Username	Amount (BTC)
RickDeckard	0.0065
Total	0.0065

Questions to the community:

• What would make you more at ease? I could post a donation address to whoever wanted to contribute to the amount in the pot, controlled by me (and that would mean that the community would have to trust me) or I can try to talk to a fellow escrow that I know to hold all the funds (including my own funding);
• Should I change some rules? Or even add more? I want it to be a fair contest for everyone but also prevent double posting from users who may create new accounts for example ...

Looking forward for any feedback.

I am also in favor of 2 weeks period for voting.


Indeed, looking back in the past at first two editions of BitcoinTalk Community Awars, not forbidding merit sending between nominees and those which voted for them may lead to incorrect results and, even more, to abuses. On the other hand, polls can tricked by using multiple accounts. I'd rather suggest to use the rules applied to lattest edition of BitcoinTalk Community Awards. From my perspective (which was shared by a dozen of other users -- you can read posts made inside this topic) a no merit rule combined with setting a minimum amounts of earned merits are very helpful:


I believe though in our case, of a pie making contest, there are lower chances for abuses, therefore the merit threshold can be lowered. Maybe 30 earned merits? Additionally, those two rules may be supplied by a rule for a minimum amount of activity in order to be eligible, which may be set to 30 as well. After all, the idea is to limit an eventual accounts farmer which could join with 100 Brand New accounts (although I think this is highly improbable to happen), therefore an amount of 30 activity points would be decent enough for still allowing a very large pool of users to participate, if they would be interested.


In most likely, allowing sponsors to hold their own funds accepted, as there are low chances to have a liar or scammer pretending to offer a sponsorship.


I believe that limiting eligible ranks to Full Member and above (combined with setting a minimum of 50 earned merits) will make the pool very small for a pie making contest. In the case of BitcoinTalk Community Awards, this rule allowed, if I remember well, about 3000 users. From these, only 141 (eligible) voted. And this was a contest with a very high exposure. Most likely, for our pie making contest the exposure will be lower, therefore the real pool of possible voters would be dramatically lowered.

Here I'd suggest instead to eliminate the rank requirement, as long as we keep the merit requirement and have the merit requirement set to 30 instead of 50. Regarding abuses, again, chances are very low: who would make some merit abuses to merit his accounts from a possible own accounts farm, in order to have 50 earned merits per profile just in order to participate at a pie making contest?

Tl; dr: my suggestion is to extend voting period to 2 weeks, set an eligibility rule allowing only users which earned at least 30 merits and 30 activity (no matter the rank), forbid merit sending from nominees to those which voted for them; and allow eventual sponsors to hold their funds and personally send them to winners

After considering the feedback it actually ends up making sense. Considering not only this will be a small event, we would need to have a good sample of time in order to gather enough feedback to have a clear winner.
This is a great contribution (again) Gazeta, and shame on me not even considering taking some rules - and tweak them according to the scale of this contest - from the already well organized event that was Bitcointalk Community Awards. I suppose that the rule to forbid merit sending from nominees to the ones who voted for them is to prevent users to vote in X user because he knows that there's a high chance of receiving merit from him/her correct?

As for the required merit & activity for the contest, the suggestion from Helena Yu, yourself and CryptoHeadlineNews totally makes sense and it's far more balanced than the one I proposed. I think that 10 merit is too low as a requirement because I really would like to send a message to users that if they want to take part in this awesome contest they should try their best in making positive and informative actions whithin our community, thus earning them well deserved merit, activity and thus providing an organic growth to the platform. That is why I'm more geared towards values around 30 merit & 30 activity than lower ones, even if that means that we do end up loosing some participants (and even so, if you are really confident that you would make a great entry, I don't see earning the required amount of merits such a herculean task.)

As for the prizes, I think that having multiple users/sponsors holding their funds may make the distribution of the prizes a tad more difficult regarding each user sending Y amount to each of the winners (considering 60 % for 1st place, 30% for 2nd and 10% for 3rd), but that's easily achievable by a good spreadsheet and management. I'll also apply this criteria to the pot

---

Things are looking great guys! We're having great points being discussed, and I'm really seeing this contest being able to be launched right on time! I'm building the thread as of now, still open to suggestions until 13/02/2023 23:59 GMT

Indeed, I don't think that 30 Merit & 30 activity is such a high bar that will make such a high barrier to participate in the contest. If certain users really want to take part in the contest, they for sure will try their best to gather enough merit & activity in order to take part in the contest.
I'm more geared towards only 1 vote per user - This would make sure that you'll only pick the one that really, really stood out from the rest of the entries. It would make each user actually use different criteria to judge a certain entry and cast their vote on the one that they think truly represents the winning pie. But, then again, this is my point of view and I'm open to hear other users opinions on this...

Since nobody replied here yet, let me be the first one.

Rick, what you said makes sense and make bring more fun for the contest. I did not see a contest based on such rule before (I mean on the forum) so, why not, you should try that too. It may bring some frustration to those close to win but which just did not get to 50%+1 thus they have to go through another round of voting but, in the end, I think the winner will have much more satisfaction while looking back and remembering the emotions felt during preliminary rounds.

So try this

Nevertheless, I am more than happy to hear that you want to organize a second pie baking contest. I wish I'll win second one too; not sure if I'll be able though, but I certainly am interested in participating again