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On the off-chance anyone wants to know how it is done…

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I’ve updated the Farktography Statistics Manager to include this week’s theme. Congrats to veruca for taking the top position in the overall standings.

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Ok then. I got nothing for the contest tonight, but the Farktography Statistics Manager (v1) is ready.

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and considering all those times idle_hands kept voting off, well i think she would have left the rest of us far behind in her dust by now.

yep.

awesome stuff!

Thanks. It it a fun project actually. I really channelled my inner geek on this.

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At the risk of killing my server, a preview is available.

(edited to update url – still just a preview)

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i know! not much voting, either.

😕

ENTRIES    |TOTALVOTES

148        |869

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Here’s the update to the top 3 finishers image with this contest added and augmented with a “boobies envelope”.

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the SO has it up in bozeman for the time being

Waaaaaay off topic here, but I’m bringing the family up to Billings, Red Lodge and Cooke City in August – we’ll probably shoot down to Yellowstone for a bit. If convenient, maybe we could have a small Fark Party up around there (you know, coffee or something).

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Could it be as simple as “early posts are near the top of the page and therefore everybody sees them”?

That, and early posts have more time to accumulate votes. The early post advantage is the hypothesis. TotalFark provides the opportunity for an early post. Fark could attempt to reduce that advantage by taking certain steps, but the load on the servers would be large and why would Fark, Inc. reduce the value of TF?

I’m actually pretty encouraged that the hypothesis is not strongly supported by the analysis (p-values are “large”). In my natural state, I’m a ‘liter. I like to think I have some chance…

(note that as the analysis is run over all entries that garnered votes, in every contest, p approaches zero which means that there is a definite early post advantage. In this case, however, the analysis include entries with only one or two votes)

I’m guessing that there is a definite and strong correlation between TF’itude and landing in the top-three, but I haven’t tested that (yet).

(Great Noodle, I really am a dork)

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Let the advertising begin 😀

I just advertised in the PFAEF.

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Received a reply from my farkback and per Drew:
should be fine, just remind me in advance and we’ll get it done

So that takes us to step 2, and after the contest runs on May 3 I’ll submit the winners for the May 12 photoshop thread.

Let the advertising begin 😀

Cool, thanks Veruca!

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Being a fellow of the dorkhood, I’d be very interested in the data myself.

Heh

Finishers v Time from Greenlight

Vote Getters v Time from Boobies

Note on that last one – it only shows 6 contests. The correlation (r) is only for the top 40 vote getters. For this sample set, the hypothesis (“Early posting garners more votes”) is likely to be false. The “p” value is a measure of the confidence in the correlation. Lower p’s mean that there is less likely to be an error. Statisticians think that a p < 0.05 is a good value (if I recall my stats classes correctly).

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The way I see it, the Farktography Greenlight Time is the flip-side of what I first noticed with the Photoshop contests. I call it the Farkenberg Uncertainty Principle: Before a contest hits the main page, liters can never know both the theme of a contest AND the greenlight time at the same time.

All Photoshoppers know when the contests will hit – the queue is right there – but only TFers know the theme.

Farktographers got the opposite situation – we know the theme due to Farktography.net, but we don’t know when it will be posted to the main page. Only TFers know both.

I spent some time analyzing the post time of a particular entry versus the number of votes it garnered. In general (and for the top 40 vote getters), there is a slight correlation – the earlier the post, the more votes. But it is a very slight correlation for the sample size of 40.

When I took a look at the finish position (1st, 2nd, 3rd) for a given contest, there seems to be a strong correlation between posting before the greenlight time and making it into the winner’s circle.

I’ve got charts for both of these (because, see, I’m a geek). I’ll try to post them later tonight.

I see this as some of the sugar a TF subscription brings, assuming one finds large vote-counts “sweet”.

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Ooooh opinionated, creative people come out come out wherever you are.

I got 50% of that covered, so here’s my half-@$$ed plan-for-execution (again):

A. pick a photoshop friendly theme and add additional “rules” based on what the ‘shoppers suggested (e.g. focus, et.al.)
B. advert the heck out of the contest by telling the FPAEF about it
C. run the contest
D. submit the top-three winners as a Photoshop-contest proposal using the normal link-submission thingie
E. convince the powers that be to greenlight that submission.

I think that we’re stuck on A. So, I suggest “Focus People Focus”. I’ll make a formal suggestion over in the appropriate forum

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Here’s what I think we need to do:

A. pick a photoshop friendly theme and add additional “rules” based on what the ‘shoppers suggested (e.g. focus, et.al.)
B. advert the heck out of the contest by telling the FPAEF about it
C. run the contest
D. submit the top-three winners as a Photoshop-contest proposal using the normal link-submission thingie
E. convince the powers that be to greenlight that submission.

Other than that last bit (“convince the mods”), this is just a “normal” course of business for both farktography and photoshopper. I think we’d have a better chance of convincing them if we recruited some FPAEFer to help (and maybe Drew’s Mom!)

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