Do we think we can do this? Who usually runs this? Is it OK if I go about seeking some prizes for it?
Yes... Me... Yes... in that order, or backwards... doesn't really matter.
Let's give credit where credit is due... all this competition stuff was cuda340's idea and he sponsored the first March Madness back in 2008. He just approached me to run the thing and I've done it each year since.
I know I've not been involved in past years, but we've always tended to have some sort of March competition for the Folding@Home Team. This time round I think we can leverage the front page a bit more.
Last year we had an i7 and ran a raffle-type competition. Any thoughts on how well this worked?
I think I've established the time line on this... only been going on for the last three years. We've had some front page posts in the past... but this was before the forum / OC.com rework that happened "recently". Not sure how much action we got out of the front page in the past... but it's definitely a great resource now and we should use it.
The raffle type contests work decently because it give those with little folding power a viable chance at winning. If we just went with something like total points then the contest wouldn't be very enticing b/c we all know who would win... kind of the same dilemma we have with the Chimp Challenge. However, the raffle type contest (I feel) doesn't provide for a lot
excitement during the contest... it can get pretty humm drum IMO. You just have to look at how successful the first March Madness was in 2008 vs. last years. Here's a contest directory thread I've been maintaining... this has links to all the contest threads from all years.
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=571100
As you can see... the first March Madness was really a huge hit and the forum was really active... and it's progressively dropped off ever since.
Maybe we have flights or groups of folks with similar PPD compete against each other? I don't know... just throwing ideas out there.
I've also done a PPD competition the last two years. Where I take the participants average PPD for the week prior (7 days) to the competition as a baseline and then their entire contest PPD (total points / 28 days) as the finishing mark. The user with the largest gain in PPD also won a prize. This was mainly incentive for those smaller folders who could ramp up a couple new machines quickly and really make some nice PPD gains for the team.
I'm going to see if we can't get some suppliers to sponsor us this year.
I'd like to see the following timeline, if possible:
- Open registration from 21st Feb to 13th March, even if we don't know what the prizes are yet.
- Competition from 14th March to 11th April
- Winner announced on 18th April
Also, updates on the frontpage:
21st Feb: Registration open
6th March: Last chance to register
14th March: Competition starts
Each week have 1-2 updates on how team PPD is doing, and perhaps even an anonymous league table of raffle entries, or something?
18th April: announce winner
I think you're time line is excellent... and if we can get some suppliers to help us out than that is even better!!! The contests have been sponsored solely by T32 members in the past... no corporate or outside help... which is kinda cool, but if we can get some free gear I'm all for it.
Let me be clear...
I AM NOT VOLUNTEERING. I've expressed in several public threads already the desire to pass off this duty to someone else. RL is just too busy for me right now to deal with this. However, I'll be happy to help get the ball rolling and "hand off" to the chosen one. I have some apps I've written (they're crude) to handle generating the numbers I've used in the past. Without knowledge of how they work or were written they'll probably be of little use to someone else. But, if said person can read a little C# code then I'll be happy to pass them off.
What I'd really be interested in doing is building something we can use to do ongoing, monthly contests. This is a little bit of a pipe dream however... web development is not my strong skill set, so putting something like this together would take some time. I've already attempted (still have the code) to pull in and process all of Stanford's user statistics dump. It's a 20 some megabyte text file... which translates into A LOT of data on each 3 hour update. I don't know how Jason @ EOC does it... however, my database skills are shoddy at best.
That's all I've got and I'll leave it with you David or whomever decides to take the reigns... I'm at your disposal. Just let me know what I can do to help.
