It has come to my attention that the Photo of the Week contest is not being conducted in the spirit in which it was originally intended - to be a fun way to show off your latest photos and invite constructive criticism. Today one of our most active members has decided to delete all of their photos and leave the Gallery for good.

I am therefore planning to change the way in which the Photo of the Week contest is run, in the next couple of weeks.

I’m currently looking at something along the lines of the contests over at [URL=http://www.fredmiranda.com]http://www.fredmiranda.com[/URL], where Fred selects the best X number of entries from the week (in his humble opinion), and then sets up a Poll where everyone can vote for their favourite - therefore you would effectively only get one vote, which would remove any chance of vote-rigging.

So it would be a 2-stage process. I would pick my favourites and create a Poll on the Forum, and you would have a certain number of days in which to vote for the overall winner.

This will only work if:

i) you all trust my judgement and don’t question it too much :)
ii) you all take the time to vote for the overall winner

I may also introduce a weekly theme, rather than it being an open contest, and also add some prizes.

The Monthly Competition will stay as it is.

You will still be able to rate photos and leave comments on the Gallery, where you can choose to ignore them if you want to. These will not be taken into consideration when either the Monthly Competition or Photo of the Week is judged.

Please leave your comments in this thread on the Forums:
http://www.photographyblog.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=101&st=30&#entry522

Whatever I decide to do will probably not please everyone, but it will hopefully prevent people being driven away from the community…