Basic Rules:
1. Stories are to be submitted before the set date.
Extensions will not be offered unless an extremely viable excuse is given. These dates will usually be within 6-7 weeks of contest announcement, in order to provide enough to the writer to plan, design, write, and edit their stories.
2. Your stories cannot be edited by judges.
As the many of the admins and judges on this group are editors themselves, it would not be fair, nor appropriate to ask one to edit your story before submission. Asking others to edit is, quite obviously, alright, as long as they have no hand (hoof) in the contest results.
3. You cannot judge on the contest if you are participating in it.
This is self explanatory.
4. Notify judges of your story submission
This can be done with a simple PM to any judge that is on the contest. When contests are announced, judges will be listed for easy access. Please also make note of the contest in your story description, in order to warn judges what they are about to read, just in case.
Guidelines:
1. The stories submitted must contain Twidash in some way.
Other ships can occur, but the stories must contain Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash interacting with one another in a significant way. This can be from things as obvious as kissing to as subtle as entwining their tails.
2. No Clop.
There never will be a clop contest. While not all clop is inclusively bad, many readers are not entertained by the pornographic nature of these stories. It is why you will never see such things being shown at other contests.
3. No Rule 63
While we do allow R63 into the group, many readers do n--....Okay I'll just be honest the admins hate R63 and if you try and enter that stuff we most likely won't judge you fairly at all. So to spare our sanity and your chances of winning, please don't.
Having Twilight or Rainbow be changed through magical means is perfectly fine, so long as they are suppose to be female and still retain their actual names.
4. There is no size limit.
While it would be difficult to write an epic piece in the amount of time offered for the contest, stories are not restricted in length. Just be aware that there are such things as too little and too much detail.
Judging
1. The judging process takes one week
This provides enough time for all of the judges to read the stories, without rushing, and to compare them.
2. Judging quality is individual specific
While guidelines do exist in other mediums for how to judge a story, this is often accused of being the reason for masterpieces not receiving the awards they deserve, such as Dark Knight and the Oscars. Each Judge has their own merits of quality.
3. Judges will list their top three pics with their favorite as #1
This is because not all judges will easily agree on a best story, and as state above, there are different merits to judging a story. To prevent this, the stories will be ranked by judges in this order with #1 spot worth 5 pts, #2 as 3 pts, and #3 as 1 pt. The story that earns the most points wins. These results will only be shown if majority of authors participating in the contest agree. This is friendship land, we don't want to breed hate.
Prizes
1. The Guaranteed Award
The story that is voted the best by majority among the judges will be featured in a folder within the group, labeled for contest winners only. This folder is accessible only by admins and contributors. The story will also be featured on the main page with picture (if one is available), synopsis, and author all listed.
2. Possible, but rare, prize
Occasionally, and very rarely, contests may offer a cash prize. However, these will not be frequent, and in order to participate, there will be a small buy in. The cash prize is directly proportional to the number of writers entering.
All participants in these contests will be listed in the contest notification, in order to ensure that the author receives the full amount of money spent to buy in. Simple math of multiplying the buy-in by the number of participants is the cash prize. This is the real world, corruption must be prevented.
Questions or Concerns
For any questions regarding the rules of a contest, please PM a TwiDash Admin or any judges confirmed to be hosting the contests

When is the next contest? Do you know?

We aren't quite sure when the next contest will currently be. Not 'til the prompt collab is over is all we really know.