The 25-Line ActionScript Contest

The inaugural 25 Line ActionScript contest is about to begin.

Browse the rules and current contest pages from the menu at the top of the site. The contest begins this coming Saturday morning. Please don’t submit anything until then. And please read all the rules. Early, late, and incorrect entries will be rejected without notice.

I’m pretty psyched up to see what people come up with!

And don’t forget, an Adobe CS4 Suite hangs in the balance.

Go grab your copy:

https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=flash

and start getting familiar with it. The contest will start on November 15th!

I’m going to tidy up the rules, make sure all the infrastructure is in place, and the judged are ready, and we’ll get this thing rolling. Don’t forget, the winner gets a CS4 Suite, courtesy of Adobe. And we might have some other cool stuff to give away too. Stay tuned.

Yeah, you knew that. You can go buy it now. Unfortunately, it looks like the trial download won’t be out for another month or so. I’m committed to letting as many people in on the first contest as possible, so I’m waiting until the trials go live before firing it up. Hang in there!

Just testing the polling system here. But this is a real question. Voter registration means that you would have to register with an email address in order to be able to vote. This should limit repeat voting.

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Yeah, big news, CS4 announced today, which means we are one step closer to holding a contest.

Unfortunately, they did not announce an actual release date publicly yet. Amazon is saying CS4 will ship mid November when I looked this morning. But people who pre-ordered CS4 today were told it would ship October 14 or 15.

Anyway, the contest can’t really begin until there is a trial download, since I imagine many people will be grabbing the trial to do the contest, and hoping to win the CS4 Suite. So, as soon as we have some official, official word, we’re on standby.

[Update]

Just saw on the Adobe store site for Flash CS4, “English language version is expected to ship by late October 2008.” That’s still a bit vague, but maybe we’ll shoot for November 1 to start the contest. Will update you when I get something a bit more solid, but you can pencil that in for now.

Here’s the plan for judging the contest entries:

1. All entries are reviewed by a panel of judges. Each judge chooses her or his favorite 10 entries for the month.

2. The favorites are pooled together into a single list. A scoring process is used to narrow down this list to a total of 10.

3. The 10 finalists are voted on by you in a poll here.

And the great news is that we have judges! A group of names you probably have heard of. All were chosen for their skills and experimental and inquisitive attitudes. Here they are:

Paul Ortchanian
http://reflektions.com/miniml/

Kristin Henry
http://www.underground-flash.com

Seb Lee-Delisle
http://www.sebleedelisle.com/

And of course myself.

We’ve already had some conversations and are ironing out the process. We’ll be ready for your entries and plan on having a lot of fun!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the rules and how to administer this contest. I’m really glad I started this site well in advance, because you guys have given my TONS of great feedback, ideas, and brought up more potential problems than I ever would have come up with myself.

Seemingly, one of the biggest problems is how to define the “rules”. On the one hand, you don’t want people devising ways of just endlessly chaining expression on exression and writing an entire program in three or four lines. Yet there are many ways of putting what should be multiple statements into one line, and people keep coming up with more. I could write rule after rule after rule trying to cover every possible base, and I”m sure someone would still think up some way of doing it that I hadn’e covered. Also, the more rules you have, the more you start limiting people from being creative with stuff. I have a pretty good idea of what is or is not in the spirit of the contest, but codifying that is tough.

One possible way is to just have some overriding rule that attempts to cover anything, like “lines may be at most X characters long.” I don’t really like this one because it’s just so arbitrary.

Or one I seriously considered, Rule 0: I AM THE LAW, which would allow me to say, “yeah, technically, that doesn’t break any rules, but I say NO.” Tempting, but I really don’t want to be in that position.

Another thing I’ve been debating is polls or judges. Having judges gives you a measure of control over the process. But I really like the idea of the community deciding the winner. Then again, I don’t know how many entries we’re going to get. What if there’s 100 or more? You can’t create a poll like that.

After much thought, I think I came up with a great system that solves all of this. Here’s the plan:

1. Contest is announced and starts. People have two weeks to submit their entries.
2. All entries will be submitted via the WordPress commenting system, so all will be public and open. There are no restrictions or disqualifications at this point. Anything that is posted goes up there.
3. AFter two weeks is up, the contest is closed for entries and judging / voting process begins.
4. First, there is a panel of “celebrity judges” - two or three people plus myself probably. Each judge picks his or her ten favorite entries for the month. This will result in a final pool of 10 to 40 entries. The judges will then vote on these in order to narrow it down to the top 10. Judging criteria would be something like quality, creativity, and adherance to rules / spririt of the contest. Thus, without explicitly “disqualifying” any particular entry or worrying too much about rules, we should be able to ensure that the spirit of the contest is maintained and not abused.
5. In step 4 somewhere, there will have to be some decision about multiple entries by the same person. I think multiple entries are fine, but maybe we want to limit it so that a single person can only have a single entry amongst the ten finalsists.
6. The judges will have one week to come up with their list and narrow it down to the 10 finalists, at which point the public voting will begin.
7. Public voting will be done via an on-line poll system. Specific system to be determined. Voting will be open for one week. The next day the winners are announced, we have a big parade, ship out valuable prizes, prepare the next contest, and have a day or two of rest before it starts.

So I’m very much leaning towards a community vote over the idea of judges deciding. So I need some kind of poll system. I see the options as:

1. WordPress plugin based poll.
2. Some other software I install on my server to administer polls.
3. Some other service that allows me to create polls and put on my site but handles and tracks results.
4. A complete 3rd party service at another website.

The main points are A. Security, and B. Cost. Obviously, with expensive software prizes being put up, I want to guard against someone voting for themself 500 times. And I’d rather have something I didn’t have to pay for, since I’m doing all this in my “spare time” with no personal compensation unless I decide to throw some Adsense ads up here.

If anyone has any experience with this stuff, email me. kp [at] bit-101 [dot] com. Thanks.

I just spoke to Lee Brimelow, and Adobe will be sponsoring the 25-Line ActionScript Contest with a free copy of an Adobe CS4 Suite to the grand prize winner!!! And not just for the first month, but each month well into the contest. Thanks Lee! Thanks Adobe! I was hoping for a single copy of Flash CS4 to give away, but this is great!

We also have some other prize donors stepping up to the plate, so we can have second place, third place winners, maybe more.

So watch Adobe for announcements and get ready to download that beta whenever it comes out, and start coding!

So most people love the idea of the 25 line contest. But several people have suggested I do a 5K contest, or some other kilobyte limiting contest instead. In other words, do whatever you want in the FLA, as long as it comes in under x kilobytes.

Thank you very much for the advice. Very useful. Basically it says, “Your idea is great, but you should do something totally different instead.”

The bottom line is, this is going to be a 25-Line ActionScript contest. It’s not going to be a 5K contest or anything else. If you want to start your own 5K contest, go for it. Really. Do it. It actually is a great idea. It’s just not what I’m doing. Cheers.