Edit: See below for Judging details.

Judging

Once the contest is over and all submissions have been entered, the Judging phase begins. This'll be done in two stages: one by panel, and one by audience participation. The judging panel is worth 60% of the final score, and the audience will be worth 40% of the score. 60% + 40% = 100% total score.

Stage One: Judging Panel

I've assembled a crackpot team of judges with reasonably extensive storywriting knowledge who'll look over the entries. The panel is as listed below:

-Blueshift, of Blueshift fame.
-Obselescence, of Obselescence fame.
-Jake the Army Guy, of Jake the Army Guy fame.
-Thorax, of Thorax fame.
-ABagOVicodin, of ABagOVicodin fame.
-Alexstrazsa, of Nicolas Cage fame.

Each of these judges will give each entry a score from 1-10, which'll add up to a total score of up to 60. This'll make up 60% of your total score for placement purposes, so you'll probably want to do pretty well here. Once the judging panel's got all its scores set up, we'll seal them away in a folder and keep those handy for the end. Results to be published at the end of the competition.

Stage Two: Audience Participation

The top five scoring fics from the judging round will move on to the audience participation segment, and will be presented in no particular order. I repeat: the scores from stage one will only be published at the end of the competition, meaning that while the top five best-scorers will be present at Stage Two, there'll be no way to know which scored what relative to each other.

A form will be set up for the audience to rank the top five fics from Best to Worst. Meaning that, before you vote, you may want to set aside a little time to look at each of the finalists' entries and form an opinion on them, since you'll effectively have to cast a vote (in some respect) on all five.

Scoring in this stage is theoretically not too complicated. Basically, how it works is that your chosen "Best" fic gets 5 points from your vote, "Second-Best" gets 4 points, and so on. At the end of voting, the total votecount'll be multiplied by five, and your entry's score will be compared with that to get your final score in the Audience Participation stage, which'll be the remaining 40% of the total score for placement.

So, suppose there're 100 votes cast. If everyone ranks your story "Best" fic, you'll get 500/500 possible points, which comes out to a full 40 points from the Audience Participation stage. If everyone ranks your story "Worst" fic, you'll get 100/500 possible points, which comes out to a relatively paltry 8 points. Obviously this situation won't happen in practice, but hopefully it's clear enough to work as an example.

It's a little bit of math judo, but the gist of it is that the higher people rank your story on average, the better you'll end up doing from this stage.

Results:

Once both stages are over and done with, the results will be announced and a winner, second place, and third place'll be declared. Contest over, hooray.

Hope I've explained things clear enough. Feedback on details welcome, but I think this is the basic structure of the format we'll be rolling with.

Good luck, everyone!

3373673
Sounds sensible enough. How long is the Audience Participation segment expected to last? I assume that once the form's set up, there'll be a cut-off date before which (hopefully) as many audience members will give feedback as possible.

Also, out of purely academic interest, how corruptible is the team of judges? Pardon the unrelated tangent, but I need to do something with this massive pile of money, baked goods, and sexual favours in my possession.

3374002

Thinking maaaybe a week. Might be open to change, though. We'll see how long the Top Five are when we get to that point.

As Obs noted in his blog post, it seems that judging is going to probably take a bit longer than a week due to the sheer volume of entries. Just thought I'd put a note down here in this thread, in case someone missed his blog.