It appears the dates I announced when annoucing the competition will end up being correct after all - New submissions to the competition will close at Monday 15th August at 23:59pm.

All members of Portkey will then have exactly 1 week - until Monday 22nd August at 23:59pm - of additional voting time.

During this period of additional voting time, authors will still be able to update stories already entered in this competition. After the competition ends all stories will continue on Portkey as normal stories.

By the end of Monday I plan to have some useful features to allow members to browse through the stories more easily - including a way of chosing how to order the stories that are shown, having the stories on multiple pages, etc. It will hopefully allow everybody to sample more options.

I will also make the system function "intelligently" to make sure all stories get a large number of votes. This will be done through displaying stories with viewer votes higher up so that we have plenty of votes to get an accurate picture of how members enjoy particular stories.

As a general comment on the competition so far - there is a nice spread in the range of votes, and there has been very large member participation, which I am very happy to see. I personally can't see who is winning at the moment, and nor can anybody else, but at a glance I would say that it is *very* close. So keep up the good work everyone!

Thanks,
James

A quck question on the votes...will everyone get to see the final voting results after the competition ends?

I'm not sure at this stage. I will consider it. I don't want people to feel disheartened by their position in the competition, because there can be only one looser, and I would hate for people to go through the entries and try to determine where their story ranked.

I will consider the ratings and think about this more carefully after entries have closed.

Perhaps you could reveal their rankings privately, or something? You know, like send them an email or something showing them privately how they ranked?