[UdubBadger]

yeah its all taken care of.

I just want to address something that several of us have talked about, some in public, some in private. It's hard to tell what votes are from legit members who put stake in the contest or just from "friends to help people out; what votes are purely based on your arts strength and what votes are based on other factors such as predetermined biases or even "campaigning" to casual friends for votes behind closed doors to push photos towards the front of the pack.

These contests are supposed to be fun. I realize winning is fun but its not fun when people are biased for or against photos because of their owner, who they are, and who they know (and possibly ask to vote for them). I'm not going to sit here and accuse anyone or biased voting, campaigning or cheating but there has been rumor and some suspicion of it going on. I just ask (and I think I speak for most) that it ends and we take the emphasis off of winning and just bettering our photo skills.

If you are the kind of person who has to enter and can't take any kind of critique/criticism in the form of words or lack of votes, please just don't enter.

Part of bettering your photo skills is learning to take these comments as a positive step of what you can do better next time as opposed to why you suck this time (to put it bluntly).

As a moderator on another website who has organized these on a different basis, my suggestion now is that as long as everyone is willing to take on the task, we submit our entries via PM to the "host" of the contest and the entries remain titled but nameless. Then when the winner is chosen, the host will tell us who the photographer was. Sure some of us will be able to pick others work out of a lineup and that's fine, but it will take away the bias that I think clouds a lot of good work shining through for what it is rather than who took the photo.

What do you guys all think?