# How to go about hosting a design contest?
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-go-about-hosting-a-design-contest/88851
**Category:** Community Building
**Created:** [31.Май.2018 16:25:31 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-go-about-hosting-a-design-contest/88851 "2018-05-31T16:25:31Z")
**Posts on this page:** 12
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Andi\_B](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Andi_B)
#### Post date: [31.Май.2018 16:25:32 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-go-about-hosting-a-design-contest/88851/1 "2018-05-31T16:25:32Z")
Hoping to get some suggestions for the best course of action: We’re planning a design contest for accessories for our product, and want to allow folks in our community to submit. We’re thinking of using the voting plug in, but also want to be able to moderate submissions as they come in (they’d all likely include some form of digital artwork). I’d also create a category specifically for this contest so we can keep all submissions in one place.
Not married to this idea, but curious how others would go/have gone about something like this?
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### Author:  [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)
#### Post date: [31.Май.2018 16:38:14 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-go-about-hosting-a-design-contest/88851/2 "2018-05-31T16:38:14Z")
1. Create a category for submissions, where every entry is a new topic.
2. Manually check the topics in the submissions category daily and move the approved ones to the voting category.
3. The voting category has the voting plug-in enabled.
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### Author:  [@Andi\_B](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Andi_B)
#### Post date: [31.Май.2018 19:19:31 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-go-about-hosting-a-design-contest/88851/3 "2018-05-31T19:19:31Z")
What if we did an open and publicly visible group, and had users PM us their submissions? Would we be able to link to that for social/marketing promotion of the contest? Then I’m thinking we could move each PM to a Topic and have them appear as posts?
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### Author:  [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)
#### Post date: [31.Май.2018 19:44:35 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-go-about-hosting-a-design-contest/88851/4 "2018-05-31T19:44:35Z")
Well, if you want every submission to be private until approved that’s the way.
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### Author:  [@Andi\_B](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Andi_B)
#### Post date: [31.Май.2018 20:22:42 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-go-about-hosting-a-design-contest/88851/5 "2018-05-31T20:22:42Z")
Could we easily set the group up so you could email a PM?
What about a direct url link for sending a message to the group?
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### Author:  [@jomaxro](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jomaxro)
#### Post date: [31.Май.2018 20:52:57 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-go-about-hosting-a-design-contest/88851/6 "2018-05-31T20:52:57Z")
Both of those are possible, yes. See [Creating pre-filled personal message links](https://meta.discourse.org/t/compose-a-new-pre-filled-personal-message-via-url/35984) for creating a link, and [Configuring incoming email to create new topics or group messages](https://meta.discourse.org/t/start-a-new-topic-via-email-e-mail/62977) for email in. Note that some of the email in topic does not apply as you’re a hosted customer and we’ve configured email settings for you already.
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### Author:  [@Andi\_B](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Andi_B)
#### Post date: [06.Июнь.2018 18:18:38 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-go-about-hosting-a-design-contest/88851/7 "2018-06-06T18:18:38Z")
Okay, I’ve gotten all my ducks in a row with your help, except one: I’m getting this (seemingly) same error when testing my URL: [URLs for Group Message: Error for private groups](https://meta.discourse.org/t/urls-for-group-message-error-for-private-groups/70631). I have it set to Group-owners-and-admins-only visibility, but everyone can message and all the tests I’ve done resulted in the same “Sorry, an error has occurred.” message.
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### Author:  [@jomaxro](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jomaxro)
#### Post date: [06.Июнь.2018 18:31:01 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-go-about-hosting-a-design-contest/88851/8 "2018-06-06T18:31:01Z")
Yeah, your site doesn’t have the fix deployed yet, let me queue that up.
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### Author:  [@jomaxro](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jomaxro)
#### Post date: [06.Июнь.2018 18:52:09 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-go-about-hosting-a-design-contest/88851/9 "2018-06-06T18:52:09Z")
OK @Andi_B, your sites have been updated, please give it another try.
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### Author:  [@Andi\_B](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Andi_B)
#### Post date: [06.Июнь.2018 19:05:18 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-go-about-hosting-a-design-contest/88851/10 "2018-06-06T19:05:18Z")
Didn’t work. My apologies for not specifying; we have 2 communities…was it deployed to [https://community.relaygo.com/](https://community.relaygo.com/)?
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### Author:  [@jomaxro](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jomaxro)
#### Post date: [06.Июнь.2018 19:05:57 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-go-about-hosting-a-design-contest/88851/11 "2018-06-06T19:05:57Z")
Yep, it should have been deployed to both sites (and your staging site). Let me take a closer look.
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### Author:  [@jomaxro](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jomaxro)
#### Post date: [06.Июнь.2018 19:22:06 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-go-about-hosting-a-design-contest/88851/12 "2018-06-06T19:22:06Z")
This was resolved via PM. When messaging a group be sure to `groupname` not `username` in the URL:
```plaintext
https://discourse.example.com/new-message?groupname=team&title=topic%20title&body=topic%20body`
```