challenges

Would be nice to see them return. I used to enjoy reading them all and marking according to my own tastes. Discovered a few new authors I didn't usually focus on via Challenges, Gloup and bashfulbob to name a couple.

You guys did it all wrong. Challenges should be for fun, to encourage people to come up with stories on a certain plot. Scoring system surely adds a little spice into it but it will always leave some people unhappy. Adults are just big kids and much tougher to control when they gets naughty.

I am few years late to join LSF and drop any timely suggestion but I still have one. Every year we can have a challenge, only for new writers and with no scoring. Without scoring, it won't be much trouble. The participation might be less than expected but we'll always get some new writers.

I miss the challenges. I'd definitely love to participate in one. I wouldn't change anything about them. Considering all positives and negatives, I think they were a net positive.

Yes, I enjoyed the challenges for what they were: a challenge. They forced me to come up with plots under the challenge guidelines that I might never have dreamed up otherwise. I never got off my duff and tried an entry until I think what proved to be the final three and wish now I'd done so earlier. I got more constructive criticism from the comments on those stories than my regular submissions.

Unfortunately all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the scoring system took the joy out of conducting the challenges for our site owners, especially given how much additional work was involved to post 40-50 stories and run the scoring for them. There's never going to be a perfect scoring mechanism that will make everyone happy so why not remove that aspect altogether and just submit stories for the sake of showing off your work?

@ mj2001

I think that's a great idea...just have a challenge with a suggested theme and let people submit to that theme. I think I may have entered two of the challenges and I really enjoyed them and also found I got a great many constructive comments as a result of my submissions.

I've placed in a few and lost many more, but was never upset, as it always seemed to me that the purpose of the contests is to promote the genre and encourage writers to write, rather than rocket me to the super stardom that has so unfairly eluded me.

It's quite funny that I had not even realised that the Challenges had been terminated.
For several years I held the opinion that Challenge stories were not worth reading because surely a writer will write their best stories when given a completely free hand, rather than being constrained by the rules of a challenge.
But even if that was not the case, I didn't feel that I had the time to spend on reading all the entries in time and taking sufficient notes in order to be able to vote correctly when I had finished.

However I then came across some of the challenge stories which actually were of high quality, so I suppose that if the Challenges gave the inspiration to those authors then they were indeed worthwhile (though perhaps not for the organisers, due to all the extra work involved).

Sugarcane's idea of using Challenges for new writers only seems like a good idea, but then I thought if others are like me (considering writing a story but wanting to get the background story right), then they might well put that off while awaiting a Challenge.

I always enjoyed trying to write to the challenge theme, unless I really couldn't think of a storyline.
I have to admit I disliked the scoring and the competitive element.
I really liked the usually very constructive number of comments it provoked.
I would like to see it return without a scoring system and just comments.
It was a fun intellectual challenge that in my opinion was spoiled by a totally unnecessary competitive element.
So Flopsy and Februs, how about a non-voting challenge just for fun.

To all those now suggesting a non-voting/scoring challenge: Please recall that it was this same line of proposals that seemed to put the final nail in the Challenges in the first place. It seems ironic that people are blaming certain others in the past for ruining the challenge feature while making the exact same suggestion they did.

(The thread is still there if you don't believe me)

I don't care if there's voting or no voting I just want them back. I never expected, or cared for that matter, to"win" any of them. To me winning meant I submitted something and got great feedback.