Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!

The first-ever macosxhints 'Best Hints' contest Apps
I'm thrilled to announce the launch of the first-ever macosxhints.com contest: The Mac OS X Hints Best Hint Contest. This is a little contest designed to reward our hint contributors throughout the summer. So without further ado, here are the basics of the Best Hints Contest:
  • For the months of July (retroactive to July 1st), August, and September, the Macworld editorial staff will be choosing the three best hints that were published in each month.
  • Each month, the three winners will receive: That's a total of nine iPods we'll be giving away through July, August, and September!
  • The Macworld editors will score the hints on a scale from 1 to 10, based on a mix of criteria including the usefulness of the hint and the clarity of the instructions. We'll then rank the hints based on the average score, and pick the three highest-ranked hints each month.
As you might expect, there are rules that go with running a contest such as this one, and we want to make sure everyone reads the official rules prior to submitting a hint. In particular, I wanted to point out that you must include an email address to be eligible (if you're submitting a hint as an anonymous user). If you're a registered user, make sure you've provided a valid email address in your profile, as that's the only way we'll be able to get in touch with you. We've also done our best to make sure that anyone can enter -- there are no restrictions based on geography.

It's also important to note that entries must be submitted via the standard macosxhints.com submissions page, not via an email to me (or any other method). There will be a reminder about the contest (and the need to include your email address), as well as a link to the rules, directly on the submissions page.

So if you've got a hint in mind, and you've just been waiting for a good excuse to type it up, now you have one -- we'll be giving away nine iPods and Macworld subscriptions over the next three months, and you could be one of the winners! Finally, I'd like to thank Macworld for making this giveaway possible; the opportunity to do things such as this as a way to thank the members of the community is one of the things I was looking forward to when I chose to join them just over a year ago.

If you have any questions, please feel free to post them here and I'll do my best to post replies.

-rob.
    •    
  • Currently 3.00 / 5
  You rated: 5 / 5 (6 votes cast)
 
[11,377 views]  

The first-ever macosxhints 'Best Hints' contest | 12 comments | Create New Account
Click here to return to the 'The first-ever macosxhints 'Best Hints' contest' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
link fix?
Authored by: stevebr on Jul 17, '06 07:52:30AM

Rob, Your link to the contest rules points to your development site.



[ Reply to This | # ]
link fix?
Authored by: dan55304 on Jul 17, '06 08:17:05AM

This is the first good hint 8-)



[ Reply to This | # ]
link fix?
Authored by: robg on Jul 17, '06 08:43:42AM

Sigh. Sorry about that; the dangers of a dev site :). It's fixed now...

-rob.



[ Reply to This | # ]
link fix?
Authored by: stevebr on Jul 17, '06 09:27:32AM

More like the dangers of using absolute paths in your markup ;)



[ Reply to This | # ]
link fix?
Authored by: zane on Jul 17, '06 03:07:32PM

Need to fix the link on the hint submission page too. :)



[ Reply to This | # ]
The first-ever macosxhints 'Best Hints' contest
Authored by: giulio on Jul 17, '06 08:33:34AM

I think you should also base your rating on the amount of views the hint got in relation to the other hints posted in the same time period. And divided by number of days in the time period... or something like that...
So a hint submitted on the last week has the same fighting chance than a hint submitted three weeks earlier. Know what I mean? :) Say a hint is 10 days old and got 100 view. This would rate the same as a hint only one day old with ten views.
Analytics is fun.

---
Web Development: http://www.webveteran.com



[ Reply to This | # ]
The first-ever macosxhints 'Best Hints' contest
Authored by: stevebr on Jul 17, '06 09:35:47AM

Well, the contest is for best, not most popular.

The rules seem pretty fair to me, and the judges are presumably qualified to make the call on what is a good hint.

Anyway, view count probably isn't really an accurate measure here: Many of the hints are brief enough to be read just by loading the index page without viewing the individual hint page.



[ Reply to This | # ]
The first-ever macosxhints 'Best Hints' contest
Authored by: giulio on Jul 17, '06 09:53:35AM

...and clicking to view means the reader wants more information because they are interested in it (or wants to post a comment, etc). Doesn't that make a hint more important?
I think same goes with the amount of comments a hint gets. It's creating buzz because more people think it's important.
Human judgement is biased and objective. A person may not care about a game related hint, and so not even know how to test and rate the hint. But us members as a whole can - by the rating stars, the amount of views, and the amount of comments.
Take google's pagerank for example. There's no panel of judges rating sites... it's all numbers. Many can argue PageRank is flawed or flaky, but still it's premise is fair.

---
Web Development: http://www.webveteran.com



[ Reply to This | # ]
Click Fraud
Authored by: luomat on Jul 17, '06 11:52:10AM

"Views" is completeley fair until someone starts getting all his/her friends to load the page.

You've heard of "click fraud" right?

I'll take the subjective, biased opinions of a group of people who routinely work with this stuff (dare we say "experts") over some "Let's see how we can work the system".



[ Reply to This | # ]
Click Fraud
Authored by: giulio on Jul 17, '06 01:06:23PM

Well that's true, all systems get abused eventually. Cops, judges, juries, and there are link farms. But thats democracy. And you can't just assume fraud happening. You might offend someone who is completely honest...
I'm not saying to only count the page views divided by number of days running. I'm saying just take that into consideration as part of the total score.

---
Web Development: http://www.webveteran.com



[ Reply to This | # ]
Click Fraud
Authored by: robg on Jul 17, '06 01:22:03PM

The hints will be completely time-independent, other than month of publication. That is, the judges won't necessarily know if a hint has been published on the 1st or the 31st, nor will they know how many views it received.

They can see all of this, of course, by looking at the story date and view figures when they click the links, but neither views nor day of publication are being used in the evaluation phase.

-rob.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Your Mac is vulnerable to 9,999 viruses...
Authored by: dan55304 on Jul 18, '06 06:13:33AM
..and clicking to view means the reader wants more information because they are interested in it (or wants to post a comment, etc). Doesn't that make a hint more important?
Not really. Someone could use news media tactics to get more views: "Your Mac is vulnerable to 9,999 viruses that will destroy your computer. View now to see how to stop them...."

[ Reply to This | # ]