As many of you know, the contest at MakeFive has been a point of contention for some time around here. I’ll be honest with you; it gives me a complete and utter headache. Most of the time it works well; but, every once in a while we get one user who chases points, creating crap just to try to win.

We’ve spent countless hours trying to figure out how to address this thing, but are at a bit of a loss. As such, we’ve decided to go the easy route and just give away more stuff. So, for November we’ll be giving away t-shirts for the month’s trendsetters, as well as a “big prize” for the person with the most points.

We’ll also give away something “unique” to the person who comes up with the most interesting topic of the month. This will be determined completely “undemocratically” by us.

So, points are in full-swing again. I recognize that some of you will be pissed about this, and I apologize for not having a better solution. That being said, this rewards those who are most active on the site, as well as those who come up with really unique and interesting stuff. AND if we’re ever acquired for a gazillion dollars or something, we’ll give away more stuff. Anyone want to invest?  ;-)

We’ve also taken some time to retool the points distribution to try to keep things fair. Plus, we think the dialogue component is really important here. As a result, we’ve cranked up the points received for commenting. So, get out there and talk to the other users of the site. That’s sort of the point anyway, isn’t it?

We’ve also increased the number of points for someone voting on your topic. Frankly, we’re not as interested in you creating a topic a minute, as we are in seeing you start topics that get people talking. Oh right, and if you complete your profile, you get 500 points. So, complete it! That’s a lot of points (and I want to know what you look like).

It’s hard for us to know what works with these sorts of things. As such, all of this, will be worked on and refined over the months to come. Needless to say, we’re going to mix things up a bit from time-to-time, in order to keep things fun.

Oh yes, we have something particularly interesting brewing-up for December.

Cheerio!

Eric the Karj-inator

BTW – If you see someone who’s posting junk just to collect points, let us know. All you have to do is go to their profile and flag them. We’ll then look at the user’s actions. If it looks like they’re gaming the system, we’ll go totally “Jean Claude Van Damme” on their asses!