I’m running a photography forum https://forum.fotografos.online and want to create a photo competition or MULTIPLE do increase volume of submissions and participation on the forum overall.
I took a look at Photo Crowd and that has very promising implementations…
https://www.photocrowd.com/photo-competitions/silhouettes-9-portraiture-photo-contest-19555/
Does Discourse have anything that can be done with it? Or better to build this outside of the forum platform?
Ideas?
Definitely add a points system and place it at the top section so people can see their points. Rank them based on these points as well. This way, the competition will truly begin!
You could take a look at Discourse Category Experts and how it enables endorsements.
Another one is Topic List Thumbnails
If you have a competition category, you can enable thumbnails in that category and each first image will be seen as a thumbnail in the topic list.
I ran a photo challenge on my forum last year and used a mix of badges and a spotlight post to feature winners. One cool idea we tried was displaying top submissions on a frame from https://www.nixplay.com/ during a local meetup—people loved seeing their work in a slideshow format. It made the contest feel more real and gave contributors a little moment of fame.
This was my thought as well, but the only downside is OP would have to make a new category every time. I would still try to bucket them under a parent “contest” category though.
OP, just throwing post voting out there if you decide to contain it all in a single topic. (and then you could have a single persistent “contest” category).
I think post voting could be the ticket for this - I tested it this week and it’s great for this type of thing. The topic could explain the rules of the competition and each reply can be the submission that can then be voted up/down and get commented on.
