We need your comments, suggestions and feedback to improve this competition and to make better competitions even better!

We want to hear your opinions about what you like about this competition and what you think needs improvement.

These competitions are run for all of Portkey's members, and so we need you to tell us what you want

Thanks,
James

In a word, beautiful. Love what you've done with the place, James.

Anyway, the Felix Felicis section's layout is superb. I like it better than the standard view. Although I prefer strict CSS, for some things you really do need tables. And it looks great just how you've got it. And the form where you rate each fic is a pretty little thing itself. Can't wait to start rating. . . .

And the fact that you keep track of the timestamp when we each viewed each story is quite impressive. Took me a while to figure it out, but that's just me. It's a right nifty feature.

The only things I can squeeze out in the other direction:

Firefox is confused with having both a <font> tag and css for the "logout" link at the top right. It shows up with a blue underline.

IE6 completely misrenders the table!!! Your #litems td says colspan="0". It needs to be "2". Firefox is just guessing correctly. Have no idea if the mac browsers are working.

~Jonathan

Thanks very much! I wanted the competition to be all over Portkey, so NAPPA happily made some little images to put all over the place, which I agree look very good!



You have NAPPA to thank for all that. He did all the layouting and made the nice pretty images, as well as designing the block that appears on the stories. I admit I told him what I wanted it to be like, by all the creativity involved belong to him, and I agree that he did an excellent job



I'm really glad you liked this. I spent a while programming it because I thought it would be a really useful feature and people would really like knowing how long ago they read something .



I noticed that. CSS and I don't get along too well but I will try to fix this, or else get NAPPA to have a look at it when he appears. Thanks for reminding me about it though .



Thank you very much for pointing this out. Both NAPPA and I use firefox and neither of us spotted this. About 65% of our users DO use IE though, so it would not have been looking too flash for them. I have since corrected this problem, and I must admit that it is the fault of my HTML that this little error exists

I would like to thank you for your feedback, Jonathan. You're support has made the time I've spent putting this together seem very worthwhile. I am also thankful to you for pointing out the table error, which I would never have noticed.

Please keep me updated on what you think of the competition!

I am also very keen to hear what others like and don't like about this competition.

Thanks,
James

James,
it all looks absolutely wonderful!

I adore the layout! (thanks NAPPA!)

But, the whole programming thing! James, is amazing!

I love the fact that it keeps record of everything! The rating, how long ago I've read it! It's excellent, really is!

No CSS? It doesn't really get along with anybody. You somehow have to trick it into doing what you want. Terribly annoying. I love it just the same. I thought about it for a bit and here's my take. I'd remove the <font> tag completely and append this to your style.css file:



So your link would go from this:

to this:

Of course I don't know the PHP you have behind this, but that's the general idea.

I tried that on a copy and it works in both browsers. I think the reason it wasn't working is because the <a> tag is what causes the underline to be displayed. And since hyperlinks are normally blue, the underline (which didn't have the white <font> applied) appeared in that blue color while the text color was modified appropriately. Firefox does it according to w3c standards, and IE is just being quirky as usual. I do CSS and other stuff for a living, so it's just my forté.



Aww shucks. Any time. Except possibly when I'm sleeping.

~Jonathan

EDIT: Tags

Thanks very much! I'm glad somebody noticed and liked the record keeping. I wanted to make the features a bit different and fun .

Jonathan: Thanks very much for those clarifications. I'll get NAPPA to have a look at this so that he can review the current CSS and see if it still needs changing .

Thanks,
James

I had one more question before the voting ends. I'm assuming that this is a pointless question and that's it's already been taken care of, but is the competition being decided by the mean of all votes? For example, if Story A recieves 80 '5' votes and 20 '4' votes, but Story B recieves 1 '5' vote, who wins? I would assume Story A because it's apparent that everyone liked the story, whereas B might've only been read by one person. Any info on this would be great. Thanks.

I can assure you nothing of this nature is occuring . The week (extended by 3 more days to 10 days) between entries closing and voting closing means that an author cannot enter their story minutes before the competition ends, give it a '5' vote, and then win the competition, and that all stories entered into the competition get a large number of votes.

All stories have a large number of ratings. Members of Portkey have participated heavily in the rating process and virtually all stories have recieved more than 50 votes, with the average number of votes per story being greater than 70 . To add to this, the number of votes is continually growing .

Excellent. Thanks for the info James.

I really like the fact that there is a seperate page for all of the stories and competition entries. I also like that everything is so concise and easy to find. However, I think that you might get a better response if you were to allow unregistered people vote as well. I personally am registered, but there are plenty of people who just read for fun, and who don't write, or want to really be known who would probably want to vote.

Sirena

I loved the whole concept and think that it is a great morale booster with the release of the 6th book. I think it is kind of a way to create more of a community with one ship, plus it's a great way to read great new stories.

I can't wait to see more competitions of this nature especially with the other ships.

I also like the looseness of the rules. As an author, when I first saw the rules it got me really excited and it gave a lot "scope for the imagination." I don't like contests where they are too strict and confining, that's why I don't get involved in it. This however let people be creative and I think that was a really good thing.

All in all the whole idea was great and I would just like to congratulate you on a job well done. It was a great idea and it turned out so well. The site looks great and I loved the seperate page with all the stories on it. If I get bored, all I have to do is go to that page to find a story to read.

Just great job and I think you are doing a marvelous job with the website.

I completely and utterly agree!

I only wish the results were up sooner! I mean - where did they go? Someone lost them among the x-files?

i'm proud to be a wuzzard!

I'm kind of surprised that the competition is over so quickly, especially since the winning stories haven't been finished yet. Not that I'm complaining about the winners - they're all WONDERFUL stories and among my favorites right now. I guess I thought that either the competition would go on longer, or it would be limited to stories that are complete, as in the regular Portkey awards. *shrugs*

It was kind of a confusing setup. Thank goodness we've got 3 extremely high-quality stories in the top 3 spots

I'm very sorry to everybody about the delay. I have been very busy lately with university and my personal life and this competition has taken me some time to get everything up and running. I would like to thank you all for your patience.



Thank you for your feedback. Our aim for the competition was to provide some fun and excitement for everybody. I know the format was confusing and in future we will make that clearer. I think we integrated the competition well with the fanfiction section but we can improve that further by showing a few stories from the competition at the top of the new/updated page.

As part of the prize for winning the top 3 entries will be displayed at the top of the new/updated page when I get around to coding it.

The competition recieved 95 entries and thousands of ratings - more than 7,000 infact. I know it might have seemed quick but it lasted in total approximately one month. In future we may look to extend it a bit longer. The decision to allow non-completed story was benefical in my opinion because it has hopefully encouraged some authors to start some novel-length stories for all our of members to enjoy .

I think it would be good to let the authors see their ratings if they would like to, privately, but they don't have to view them if they don't want. Like, maybe there could be some kind of way for them to sign up and have their rating sents via email, or just send the email to everyone, and they don't have to open it if they dont' want to.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I'll ask anyway.
I know there had been previous Portkey Awards (I saw them quite a long time ago) and I've been looking for that thread for days. My eyes are about to pop-out and so I'm doing the easiest way now, that is, asking you.

Where can we find this list of previous winners?

The forums are at the very bottom of the main page (the index). There's also the winner thread itself if that's all you're looking for.

Hope that helps,
~Jonathan

EDIT: Stupid tags.

Er, one thing. you might want to check the fics more carefully in future - Just that you state that the events in the book must not be ignored, and yet there's a few fics that do - For instance Caina's "Year Six" completely ignores Harry and ginny's romance and the entire Slughorn plot.

If you're going to have rules, you really need to hold entrants to them.