pouët.net

So, solution: Shadow parties must register with demoparty authorities officially to get vote access!

Saga: but it's only allowed if they pay their annual Scenepoints Participation Fees.

Well, for me, the sofa scene experience usually doesn't mean being completely alone, not necessarily at home, and it's more fun with some beer in the equation...

Anyway, sofa voting or not, whatever changes are made, something will be changed. ;) It can't be like, "make it better but just don't change anything".

dfox, of course! That should also convince a few more shadowparty visitors to participate in actual demoparties.

hm. if voting at a demoparty awards you scenepoints - you could use them to vote at parties where you're sofascening.

Could this perhaps be a way to make the Alternative Party a little bit "alternative", while at the same time being a demo party...? :)

Deadlines shouldn't be set in stone imho. I met enough sceners who were working on their stuff up to the last possible moment. I also have been part of such crunches myself. Consider that most sceners don't go to a demoparty each week. We're not talking about finishing random commercial projects here, people invest a lot of love and passion, thus they want to make the best of it. Imagine groups getting into this "we have to finish this" rush a week before the party (investing a lot of time besides their daytime jobs). Let's say they work non-stop on it during that phase, investing 50 man-hours or sth. Another 10 hours of extending the deadline times the number of coders involved can make a huge difference.

Also, what dfox said.

Also keep in mind that organizers sometimes approach party visitors they know to ask for compofillers if a compo is in danger of not having enough entries - this would be a lot harder or impossible to do if deadlines and compo times were not flexible.

hmm.. shadow parties do happen in some cases. Charge a (low) entry fee to help support the party and get vpn access to the party net for voting?

(grr pouet db connection error dropping my long post)
Sofasceners participating in the vote (with some limit like 40% to their total influence AND a secure system of telling accounts from people) would be fine for the quality of the results imho, especially when viewed retrospective ;)

For parties that don't have the prize giving in the middle of the night, the voting deadline should be extended all the way up to the (delayed) ceremony - any need of knowing the results before going live? The last morning is a fine time for voting (people getting up wasted, just staring into their screens anyway), so remember the nag screens on the beamer etc, and especially while waiting at their seats for the ceremony they can just as well vote.

Psycho: organizers also need time to prepare the prizegiving ceremony - at least at larger parties when there are prizes to distribute and/or other stuff to do. So voting until the last minute is not always possible.

Sure, there's a lot to prepare, but generally the actual result shouldn't influence that?
I fully support that parties like revision have floating prize distribution depending on the compo qualities etc, but it sounds seriously wrong if it's dependent on who actually wins ;)
You already know which compos that may only have 2 entries, and even with early deadlines you can't know whether the winners are still present or not. You could have some shared first places etc, but that *could* be avoided by the ranking system if wanted.
And of course you should do a last minute check through the results before going live that nothing is fucked up, but with proven automatic systems that's really unlikely and therefore CAN be when everything else is ready.

..Ohh yes, I can see the really big parties with decent money prizes may have some paperwork to sign, which may have to be pre-filled and printed (IIRC it's actually pre-filled at revision, while at tg there was a lot to fill backstage, and i don't remember anything serious at the asm prizegiving).

Anyway, point being: Try to make it possible to vote after getting up. And for the parties without legal paperwork it could be cool to allow people to vote while sitting there, waiting for the ceremony to start.

drinking beer beats voting 10 times out of 10.

anyway, i'm way too lazy read all this seven pages; but in the old times, voting was on small pieces of paper, in 5 minute breaks between compos. That had two advantages: first, you were more or less forced to vote by peer pressure; second, since you voted for each compo just after the compo, you had a slight chance to actually remember at least a few entries!

so, this is a case when old school "technology" actually beats shiny new technology in the field, even though it seems to be a no-brainer to everybody (including myself) that the new technology should be much better

No, this isn't going to work. Just as a WLAN, UMTS cell towers have a limit both on bandwidth but also on concurrent active users. The limits are actually lower than on a WLAN. There can be thousands of people being booked into a cell tower at the same time, but only a rather small number of those can actually transfer data at the same time. There is a reason UMTS is slow at demoparties even without voting going through these networks. UMTS, like WLAN, is a shared resource. At Revision there is an array of WLAN APs to increase capacity lightly (frequency bands still are a limited resource). This capacity is far bigger than the sum of the capacities of all 2G/3G/4G networks that exist at the location.

Shadow parties tend to be glorified sofa scene get-togethers, how do you put a price on that? Also, small event have a hard time keeping the network up, never mind streaming *and* a solid vpn.

Also, if Scamp didn't throw that idea down a massive hole enough for you: data roaming costs are still marginally insane.

The best way to make people vote is to make sure the voting system actually DOES work (hello evoke 2013, at least regarding demo/wild which was unavailable until a large part of the visitors already left or went asleep^^)

Opening the voting as soon as the compo is over is another good idea (did that at Nordlicht, downside is that it only works if the data already is correct rather than incompletely rushed in at last second)
Live voting is even better, that would be pretty great for music entries: Watching your screen a few seconds for voting reduces your compo experience by roughly 0% (and some people do make notes on their devices anyway - and the delays between the entries are also often long enough for voting a single entry)

Providing previews is fine as the screnshot option already showed, extending it with live playback would be fine. Autogenerated default previews might be a nice feature, but leaving it up to the submitter is fine as well (you DO want to get votes, don´t you? ;)

Providing a download option (FTP preferrably, downloading file by file via HTTP stinks) can also help voting participation.

Oh, and some people loose their votekeys for whatever mess-lack-of-sleep-and-excessive-intoxication-reason - no idea what can be done in that case, though ;)


I´m against sofa scener voting and the like - real party is the party, live with it or GTFO.

I remember that voting was once rewarded with scenepoints, but then the economy crashed due to a scenepoint bubble created by suspicious unnamed subjects ;)


Paper votesheets are only a last-ressort option if everything else falls apart: Once you´ve ever counted even just as few as 50 votesheets with a dozen of options on each sheet you know why ;)

A couple of "It's time to vote" funny clips (à la "Kill all audio & lights" @ ASM) could be an efficient & nice way of reminding everyone voting is important.
(you could throw a vote-clip compo at the next Revision to have some

All the solutions to smoothen the voting system himself (mobile version, screenshots, more time to vote, additional computers avalaible for this task,...) are important too.

Anyway, the free-beer incentive is probably the best solution here :D.

I read "Getting more people to vote drunk during demoparty"

Free beer for votes is pretty much the stupidest idea here so far.

Err, what? I mean - yes, technically they do, but I can't think of any party I've ever visited where this was a real issue -- and that includes Assembly, The Gathering, TRSAC, Solskogen and even Kindergarden, which is in the middle of nowhere.

An issue that can keep me from voting, e.g. in a music compo: not remembering which music track I liked. Instead of bribing people with beer or whatnot, I think we should try and make it easier for people.

One thing that's made voting in gfx compos a lot easier are thumbnails - But I usually just upload the full image for a thumbnail, so people can see the actual thing they're voting for right there in the voting system. Maybe that same approach could be used with music and demo compos?

A direct translation would be that you should be able to actually listen to the tracks again, see the demos again, etc. Which obviously requires that you are able to capture video of all productions, get them transcoded and that your LAN / WiFi is working well.

also i think its about providing the most possibilities and spread the usage across all available networks. even if 2/3g is slower it will help a few. plus people use different mobile providers which should further break it down.
nobody is suggesting to turn of the party wifi or make the vote-server unaccessible through it...

wysiwtf: I'm saying the issue brought up is not a real issue.