I'm also very excited 🤩 I'll have another test one up in a bit, with item prizes.

the creator of a contest can choose to give prizes to 1, 3 or 5 people, so figuring out how to get the item holding to work is a little tricky - but I think being able to give out 5 CWs to winners (or other items) would be really cool.

and then hopefully in the next few days i'll be able to open up creating a contest to a few folks -- i'll add you to the list!

Here we go - round two of testing https://kumos.subeta.net/wardrobe/outfits/contests/2

This is the second contest I'll be running which hits most of the rest of the pieces of code, including... item prizes! the top five winners will get a prize, that I've been able to set.

I also did a pass on the creation page, to try and make it as understandable as possible.

whew that crashed kumos 😰 have some queries to clear up, but that's why we test!

It doesnt yet - but it'll do a base calculation for the CWs for price. I'm thinking that will usually be used as a kind of challenge for people, and meant to be hard. i'll make sure it gets added in before (and the calculations on the outfits page reflect!) the cost of a CW if we haven't seen one purchased in the shops before.

that is very annoying! a 50* error means something is happening on the server side, so it makes sense that you'd get it in all of your browsers.

are you getting this when you go to the page (e.g. you can't load anything) or when you try to submit an avatar. if you go to another page on kumos (e.g. kumos.subeta.net/news) and login, and then go to the page, do you still get a 502?

that's really helpful! do you get that error when you go to https://kumos.subeta.net/wardrobe/outfits/contests/3, which I just created?

A-HA! found the issue. here’s the error from our reporting:

allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 20480 bytes)

you’re an amazing user with a TON of outfits (thank you 🙏), but that’s actually the problem. i tweaked the system based on feedback to only show outfits that meet contest criteria, but rn it’s going through all your outfits to check if you own the right items. it’s literally running out of memory trying to do that.

i’m going to rewrite this query, add some caching, and maybe make it a button you can click to verify outfits on demand.

either way, i’ll fix it before we ship. can’t have it break for our most dedicated outfit creators! 💖

i think i will probably just fix that because it makes my posts look unhinged 😭

All right, as a final little test before I push the capability to create out to everyone, I've got a few updates.

And a few contests to test those features

Faster Loading You now have to click a button on each contest for it to load your outfits that meet the parameters (and it checks them in batches, so if you have a lot of outfits this might take a minute). This should make the page itself load much faster!

Require Item(s) You can require up to 5 items on the outfit. This was mentioned in my first post but I didn't an example, but now we do - all of the new Wear it Best contests require a specific item. The googley eyes contest does not require the next new rule... and if you have any of those items in your vault, now might be a good time to break them out 😉

Own Items You can toggle (off by default) a rule that all items on the outfit must be owned by the user at the time of submission and prize awarding. I imagine this will mostly be used by me/the staff for official contests with big prizes that we want to encourage folks to run out and buy up specific items. For most user run contests I think users will keep it off!

I can't wait to see what you make for those contests, and as the testing winds down (one more finishing) I hope you're thinking of fun contests you'll run 😉

Once you enter in the contest, you should see your entry at the front of the pack and be able to remove it and enter something else.

As you can see, this contest: https://kumos.subeta.net/wardrobe/outfits/contests/2 is ending in one hour! once it ends, it'll enter the voting phase for 24 hours, where the rules will let anyone on the site vote. When creating a contest, you can choose to only allow entrants to vote.

The reactions are separate, but take up a lot of space right now. They're just the reactions on that outfit, and if you click through to it you'll see them there as well and they'll carry over to other contests. They're just a way to show an outfit that you like it!

just pushed out some major changes, thank you for the detailed feedback everyone! this is really fun, and i'm enjoying clicking the button to see new outfits 🤣

Voting Phase

• You now see a number of avatars by default, and a button to refresh the view. This will load entirely new avatars, with a slight algorithmic edge to outfits that haven't been seen as much (so as you browse you should see fresh ones mixed in with ones you've seen). This fix actually resolved a long standing Kumos bug with how we render our UI, and things like the user/pet/group/item hovers not working correctly.
• Fixed bugs related to the voting not showing up after page 1, and other pagination related issues (by getting rid of pagination lol)
• Made it more clear that reactions are separate from the voting phase

I'm going to add a few new options for creators:

• Number of votes in voting phase: Right now this is just one, for every contest. I'm going to make it so that creators can choose between 1-5 votes for the voting phase. They'll be displayed large so you can see them, and a separate section for the outfits you've voted for.
• "Blind Voting", an option to make the voting phase "blind", where you don't see the usernames and can't click through the outfits.

Improvements I'm going to make after this one has ended:

• If the contest is over, show all of the entries ranked by their place in the contest, no more random showing needed
• Update the events to link to the appropriate contest

After that... i think i'll be ready to open it up 😎

before the response to this, i just pushed out new code that should hopefully resolve some of these pain points, and make the entry loader in particular more snappy. I've moved instructions directly into the box, and added direct feedback (the spinner) on the button while you're waiting for it to do it's work. The page also shouldn't crash anymore trying to do the initial calculation.

👋 i responded to some of this in the shoutbox, but i’ll address it here too! i’ve just pushed an update that should improve the speed and stability of the page. i also want to emphasize that this is a feature in testing—the whole point of a testing thread is to uncover bugs and errors before launching the feature site-wide.

this is actually how it worked when the feature was failing for you. it loaded 20 outfits at a time, checked the restrictions, and then moved on to the next batch. i’ve updated it to process 50 outfits at a time now, with better caching and other optimizations. i’m hoping this resolves your issue so you can view the page smoothly!

quote]Also, this system of voting means that you might never see all avatars. That you have to click a lot because you simply don’t know if you have seen all even if you try. Imo a better solution is to show all on pages but load a random page when the page is loaded for voting. So users don’t all start on page 1, but some on 4, some on 7 etc. (and there can be algorythms to make sure all pages are loaded more or less evenly). But users still can click through them and decide how to chose their vote.[/quote]

every system like this involves trade-offs, and if you look through the thread, you can see the reasoning that led to this design. i’ve considered your suggestion (and similar ones), but based on user research, most people tend to focus only on the first few pages, even if they’re dropped randomly on page 8. they’ll maybe move to page 9 → 10 → 11, but it still ends up being linear, not truly random.

the current design—randomly loading outfits and tracking what you’ve seen—removes page bias entirely. there’s no “page 1” for people to favor, and middle entries don’t get overlooked. while everyone’s preferences differ, this approach seems the most fair and effective for this type of competition. i may eventually make this a customizable option for competition creators, but for now, this design feels like the best fit.

i understand your frustration, but i want to clarify: the reason this is in testing is to avoid releasing a broken feature. i’ve put a lot of thought into this system and have been iterating based on user feedback. the issue you’re experiencing is exactly why i’m doing this test—so i can identify and resolve problems like these before a full launch.

at the end of the day, participating in testing is totally optional. for some, testing means accepting that the feature might not work perfectly yet, or at all. i appreciate your feedback—it’s helping me fine-tune the system—but i’d also ask for a little patience as i work through these edge cases. thanks for being part of the process!

100% agree on all of your feedback! the events are supposed to have links, I'm not sure what's going on that's causing them to drop but that should be fixed in the next batch of updates 🫡

and agree that the contest page can do a better job of showing what contests are in progress, and which ones are voting / have been completed. that drop down worked great when i had 1-2 in testing, now i can see how it'll create problems.

ty for the feedback!

I could try something like that! I might consider breaking it out depending on how big the contest, is too.

Honestly, for most contests I think the average entries will be 30-60 (I could be wrong! i hope they're massively successful and bring tons of people to the site and start getting hundreds of entries ;)) and so having an option to just display them all could also work. For ones with 100+ entries it could switch to this method.

You should have a button for manually looking through the next 50 outfits, no more needing to make them all private 😭

Thanks for the feedback! Lots of changes just went out, and will over the next few hours while I watch voting paterns and feedback from these first few contests. So far:

• separate entries page: instead of trying to tweak the queries on the main page to be faster and faster, i am simply going to move the entries to their own page. they're now paginated, with a cache that holds their order for 2 hours. that means in the 24 hour voting period they'll cycle 12 times, which should be enough for all of the avatars to make it through the first few pages
• voting is spelled out, with one vote per user per contest. this might be something i change / make configuratable for contest creators!
• just cleaned things up a lot, it's more clear who you've voted for, and how to remove that vote

just pushed out a few updates:

1. More explicit rules on the front page, with how each phase will go. This is important for the Dress Me contest, which was a "creator chooses" type. That means I choose the top 5 myself, rank them, and then it'll move on to the next phase ("end")
2. The event will be more clear depending on the type of contest it is. You'll still get an event when it moves to the voting phase (if you've entered - which is why you got one in the first place), but it'll be clear that it's up to the creator to choose the winner.
3. Language changes on the 'entires' page that make it clear how the voting should be going.

To give you an idea of what this looks like from my end:

I'm going to work on making it so that there is more than 1 vote per user, set per the contest rules with a range of 1-20. Once I get that in, I think this is ready for other folks to make contests 🎉

And just pushed out some (hopefully) final updates for the night:

1. When the voting_type is public, allow.... the public to vote.
2. Moved around where the voting logic takes place, not important but makes it easier
3. Added the option to increase the number of votes per user, and "vote stacking", where users can use up to 5 votes for one outfit

I'm going to continue to look at the voting patterns and the feedback on that page and try to come up with something better than this!

Most of these will be user run (once I flip the switch) so I think we'll see less entries overall, and creators will have the option to remove avatars that don't fit the theme. They can also choose to make it so they have to be approved before entering. Hopefully that should keep the 'being on theme' pretty light. Creators also have the two big large text fields where they can say more of what they're looking for.

I'm going to make the voting mechanism into an option as well, so the creators can choose to have a blind / anonymous voting, or the public voting. I think that surveys / polls are a little different than a contest, and know from our previous ones that if users are going to try to 'game the system' (by having friends vote for them) they'll do that if the names / votes are showing or not.