Labs beta: As part of our ten years celebration we've been working hard to bring you a beta of our next big site feature; Challenges. Anyone who has been on the dpreview forums will be more than aware of the popularity of photographic challenges. Until now these have been created primarily by a single challenge host creating a new thread in the forums to promote their challenge idea and others following up with entries. We decided to take this concept and develop a fully integrated challenge system for dpreview which will allow series of challenges to run, with a flexible range of rule sets, voting options and winner concepts. The public beta of our Challenges system will begin this coming Monday 29th December with the opening of five initial challenges created by ourselves which any registered dpreview member can enter. After this we'll be looking for challenge hosts to continue the next phase of the beta. (11:35 GMT)
Hopefully with some high-profile competition DPchallenge might be forced to look at changing some of its rulesets.. Looks interesting, but never be anything like good old DPC.
DPReview has always been mainly about gear, secondarily about the mechanics of photography, and way down the list about art. While it's always nice to see more options, I don't expect the average quality to be as high as here.
Well, it won't even let me REGISTER for the site since I have only web-based e-mail... guess they'll have to get along without me.
R.
Yeah, this pissed me off to no end! I was going to register over there for forum participation a couple years back and was astonished at this hurdle.
A lot of "serious" sites do this; the idea is that there will be fewer multiple accounts and fewer spammers if you eliminate the free mail servers. I think it's snobbery, myself...
Well, it won't even let me REGISTER for the site since I have only web-based e-mail... guess they'll have to get along without me.
R.
Yeah, this pissed me off to no end! I was going to register over there for forum participation a couple years back and was astonished at this hurdle.
A lot of "serious" sites do this; the idea is that there will be fewer multiple accounts and fewer spammers if you eliminate the free mail servers. I think it's snobbery, myself...
R.
Yeah, I know WHY they do it, I just don't agree with it. Peruse their forums and the same inane things occur as any other forum, ISP accounts or not, so really one can't argue that ISP users are "more serious" or "less immature." I think it's an ineffectual fix to a universal problem.
Well, I'm in now. I had a vague memory of a Comcast-provided email account from when I signed up years ago. So I got into live chat with a Comcast rep and activated it, easy-peasy :-) Not that I'm gonna USE it for anything, but there it is when I need it :-)
Geez, this thread has turned into a complaint about DPReview registration policies! For less than $10 a year there is at least one place you can go to (godaddy.com) and get your own domain name with email (Web and/or POP). So it's not like it's some insurmountable or even expensive problem.
Geez, this thread has turned into a complaint about DPReview registration policies! For less than $10 a year there is at least one place you can go to (godaddy.com) and get your own domain name with email (Web and/or POP). So it's not like it's some insurmountable or even expensive problem.
Hey, we surmounted it didn't we? And now folks planning to join up are forewarned. It's a public service, don'tya know? :-)
It's up now! Most interesting features -- no size limitations and you can see the entries before the voting period starts. Also each challenge has it's own, simple set of rules. At moment only similarity to DPC is the one week to enter, one week to vote. Certainly worth a look.
Well, it won't even let me REGISTER for the site since I have only web-based e-mail... guess they'll have to get along without me.
R.
Not being able to use my Gmail account, which I have been using for all my email for years is very annoying. Now I have to try remember the login details for my ISP account :P
Does anyone know if the challenges have the seem limit of data as DPC (ie, photo needs to be taken in week of challenge), or can I enter anything on my hard-drive that meets the other rules?
It's nice to see them integrate the challenge into the forums. It looks pretty cool. Though I don't see it as a replacement for DPC. The main concept seems to be taken from the challenges running on their forums by regular folk and volunteers...
You can see pics before voting, comment on them, swap pics, enter 3 pics per challenge, winner picks new topic, etc. but doubt it will feel as friendly. We'll see.
