Photo Contest tips for Voting

ALL ENTRIES WILL END ON JUNE 1ST,2020

This is the first year that we are moving online with the voting for our annual calendar. COVID 19 has forced us to postpone our National until next year. It is where the Spinone Club of America’s largest celebration of the breed happens and where we usually have our photo contests for the calendar every year. We are taking advantage of having to distance by bringing the contest online for members. We have spread out the voting to last all summer so if dog shows don’t start up until the fall, we will have something to celebrate for this year.

Our calendar sold out three times last year and it is a real fundraiser for the club. Mary Campbell and Gayle Crane West have done a wonderful job creating a calendar that the members love and we are hoping to do the same this year at a safe distance.

We have had a steep learning curve with the photo contests. We have had to employ two different pages on the web to conduct the contest. The first is for photo submission. This page has been quirky and we have had to resolve problems with it but it is how members will get their pictures into the contest. I cannot say this strongly enough. Members must log in to the Spinone Club of America’s web page before they can enter or vote.

ALL ENTRIES WILL END ON JUNE 1^ST,2020

Our Club is doing this for the first time and we really want the members to embrace it for the future but we have a lot to learn so you all can help us do this.

1. Submit your pictures on the submission page. This is where they will be paid for and why we have to use two pages to conduct the contest.
2. Have your pictures in the right format (JPG) and named without special characters _-!@#$%^&*().
3. The day after you submit go to the Voting page and confirm that your entries are there BEFORE THE DEADLINE. This will help us make sure no one is left out. If they are not there please send us an email so we can fix this right away.

VOTING

The voting page is located on the Members Only tab, last item. When you click on that tab you will be on the voting page. Each category that we have for the contest is entered on this page as a separate contest, therefore, category = contest. You will see four tabs right underneath the Photo Contest Voting header. The first tab is the Featured Contest Tab. This tab holds the next contest (category)  to vote on. You will be allowed to vote only once in each contest (category) so be careful not to vote before you have seen all the entries.

The next three tabs are as follows:

1. Open Contests. This tab currently contains all of the contests. They are open because I can still enter pictures. Once the submission date has passed they will all become future contests and locate under that tab.
2. Closed Contests.  This tab contains the contests (categories) that have been voted on and the voting has ended. You will see a winner once that happens highlighted in green. The rest of the photos will display in a ranked order.
3. Future Contests. Once submission has ended all of the contests will be here until the voting begins for the contest (category).

There are a few other things I need to tell you about the voting page.

1. Each page can display 20 pictures then it creates another page for pictures 21-40 and so on.
2. The best way to make sure you don’t forget to see all the pictures is to click on the first picture and see it enlarged. Once it is enlarged there is a white bar at the bottom of the display with the following Next >>. Click this button to move to the next picture. It will move to the end of all pictures without you having to change pages.
3. Under the Tabs on the Voting Page is a grey box that surrounds the pictures. In the upper left-hand corner is the name of the contest (category) and just under that a description of the contest(category).
4. In the upper right-hand corner are four separate texts. Submit Entries, Contest details, View Entries, My votes. Only the club can submit entries. If you click on that nothing will happen. You should click on Contest Details and there it will list the name of the contest (category) the submission dates, the dates voting will start and end, and that you can only vote once for the picture that you like. Clicking on View Entries will take you to a page displaying the first 20 pictures. If there are more pictures you can click next at the bottom of the page to move to the next page. The last tab, My Votes tells you if you have voted.
5. Right underneath the Contest (category) name and the four separated texts is a white box that lists in the upper left-hand corner the number of pictures and the number of votes. In the upper right-hand corner it lists how they are sorted. While voting is going on they will be sorted randomly so that it will not influence your vote. When the contest is over they will be sorted by rank.

Once each contest (category) ends there will be four days for the Club to clean up anything that we need to do before the next contest begins. The contest that has just finished will move to the Closed Contest Tab, and the next Contest will be placed into the Featured contest tab. The voting page always opens to the Featured Contest tab so it will make it easy for the members to see the current contest (category). The contest that has finished will be found under the Closed Contest Tab.

No submissions will be accepted after the June 1, 2020 deadline so please check to see that your submissions have been entered in the proper contests before June 1, 2020. You will all see my name at the bottom of each picture that says I was the one who entered the picture. In future contests, you may see the name of the SCOA webmaster or other administrators. We have to do the submissions so that is why this appears this way.

Please send all of your comments and verifications to Mary Campbell, [email protected]   Gayle Crane West, [email protected]. This way we will not mess up a perfectly good contest and you will not fall between the cracks.

Spinone Club of America hopes that we can stay together and focused on our rustic, intense, goofy, gentle breed in spite of this dangerous pandemic.