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Innovation contest winners

5 February 2007 23:24 by Petteri "dRD" Pyyny | 9 comments

Last year, we launched a small competition to our users called innovation contest 2006 in which we wanted to hear innovative ideas from our users on how to improve our site.

During the competition, we received 500 submissions that included thousands of suggestions. Ever since the end of the competition, our staff has been reading through the ideas you guys have sent to us. Some of the ideas were good, some of them were -- unfortunately -- quite bad :-) and some of them just excellent. It was extremely difficult to select the entries that truly provided something "different", but after long consideration, we are certain we picked the right ones.

The grand prize, 1,500 euros in cash, was won by our user called lawndog. The other runner-up prizes, "AfterDawn goodie bags", went to these members: chopper, bulfrog15, Dfram, pahis, bscd, kiiveri and gwendolin.

As some of the ideas were very good and haven't been implemented to our site yet, we can't tell you what the winning suggestions were. But the competition was quite an eye-opener for us in many ways; it proved couple of things that we have suspected for years. First of all, it seems that we have thousands of users who aren't aware of the fact that AfterDawn contains sections like Software or News. It seems that there's a large proportion of users who think that AfterDawn is just a discussion forum site. And equally big chunk of users who have never "found" our discussion forums, but have read our news for years now. Seriously, some of the submissions asked for AfterDawn to "add a place where one could download video-related freeware and software tools".

Furthermore, couple of users were asking us to get rid of our advertisements, altogether. Well, if we would do that, you wouldn't see any news, software updates or guides from us -- ever again :-) Some people suggested to change the site's look and feel. Some people wanted to change our site to Photoshop-related site. Some users wanted us to cover music news and gossips. And yes, some users simply wanted to tell us not to change anything, as they like our site the way it is :-)

Many, many suggested ideas we have had on our "to-do list" for years now, but obviously hearing them from our users (sometimes with very good reasonings..) obviously helps to prioritize things in future.

To summarize; before this contest, our "code and site development to-do list" had stuff for our code team for about next 24 months. After the contest, the list has now stuff for more than three years.

Thanks for all of those who participated to our contest and congratulations to all the winners!

-Petteri Pyyny
AfterDawn.com

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Discuss this article!
jetyi83 (Member) 5 February 2007 23:48
i have an idea.. add a section for freeware. [ + quote]
borhan9 (AfterDawn Addict) 6 February 2007 2:06
I have to say well dont to all the winners and I am glad to see an Aussie make the finalists. :) It is great to hear that so many suggestion made this site progress forward and that there is more things to come. Keep up the good work dRD and all of the aD members. [ + quote]
Pop_Smith (Senior Member) 6 February 2007 7:59
I wonder what lawndog (and the "Runner-up" members) suggested. :p Will dRD or another Admin revieal what the winners suggestions were once they are implemented? I assume most of them (especially lawndog's) will be something that is noticeable though, so it might not have to be explained when implemented. Congrats to all the winners. Personally, the only one I recognized up there is gwendolin. Thats funny to hear people didn't know about the forum section, or the Software and News sections. I wasn't even aware that we had Ads on aD. The only ads I can rememebr seeing are green, underlined text that are related to products and services related to the underlined words. But, as far as I remember, those ads go away when you sign-in to your account. Maybe I am mistaken but isn't aD pratically ad-free when you create and sign-in with an account? Maybe not but, if there are ads I don't remember seeing any once you sign in. [ + quote]
ZippyDSM (AfterDawn Addict) 6 February 2007 9:02
I want to see edit and quotes in the news comments NAO,I would like to see the order of posts when you reply reserved so the last post to the thread the one most likely you are commenting on is first not last. [ + quote]
Ketola (Admin) 6 February 2007 9:42
Originally posted by ZIppyDSM: I want to see edit and quotes in the news comments NAO,I would like to see the order of posts when you reply reserved so the last post to the thread the one most likely you are commenting on is first not last. Quotes and edits implemented in news comments. Unfortunately news commenting is not currently possible on new news items, but that is being fixed as I type. =) [ + quote]
ZippyDSM (AfterDawn Addict) 6 February 2007 9:47
Quote: Originally posted by ZIppyDSM: I want to see edit and quotes in the news comments NAO,I would like to see the order of posts when you reply reserved so the last post to the thread the one most likely you are commenting on is first not last. Quotes and edits implemented in news comments. Unfortunately news commenting is not currently possible on new news items, but that is being fixed as I type. =) got the quirks out of it finally? YAY! ^^ [ + quote]
solarf (Member) 6 February 2007 12:04
way cool. Cant wait to see what they proposed. [ + quote]
lawndog (Member) 6 February 2007 13:38
Well, Thank you very much. Hopefully AD will be revealing all the winning ideas soon. I know that ALOT of them have allready been implicated. But I'm sure that AD will still take ideas. I've been using AD for some time now and it always seems to be updateing stuff to make it more user friendly which I'm sure is in part to all of us, as "forum pests" with 1001 questions(Which is usually asked about 100 times) Whats really weird to me is that people never "found" the forums. Thats were I am most of the time. Thanks Again LD [ + quote]
Rikoshay (Member) 8 February 2007 8:31
Hey, congrats lawndog for winning that 1500 euros (which is A LOT by my standards :D) and everyone else who submitted a good suggestion to the site. I didn't really come here much of 2006, but I guess if I had a chance to submit a change to aD, it would probably be to make more advanced search features. If what you posted is not even nearly the same as what you typed, then it should be omitted from your search. But if that's what you want, then you should have the option of telling it so. Like, add a "Match phrase exactly" checkbox and a "Search for all words" checkbox. That's probably the only thing I would like to see changed. Also, to add to that, you should make it so if you want to search for something, you can choose which section of aD you want to view it from. Like, it you just want software, you just check that, etc. [ + quote] This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 8 February 2007 8:33