My own photography club but nevertheless demanding highest standards and innovation. We need a platform to display photos, run monthly competition and enable access to archives of previous competitions and field trips. There is a voting system in play on the competition page allowing anybody to rate a photo (one to five stars). This is available to me to announce a winner at the end of each month’s competition. Old galleries are archived to flickr and can be viewed directly from the website. photoclubmeteorite.org
It was surprisingly difficult to find a voting system plugin that suited, there were plenty of facebook style like/dislike but we needed to be able to rate rather than just goog or not. Anyway what we have works (once we sorted out the problem with one vote of 5 stars giving a higher average than 5 votes of two stars – we now work on total stars awarded. One funny thing about the voting system is that I left working on the previous competitions and found people still voting. I hadn’t pushed it on google but neither had I hidden it. There were people from all over, the USA, India, China. It wasn’t spam or bots either, I have spam filters on all my sites and the votes were reasonable, not pushing with 5 stars or anything. This year I hope to reach out to these strangers and include them in our little group, tell them about the winners and perhaps include their submissions. We will still have our own club galleries after all. On that note, our sister club in La Souterraine has decided to focus more on field trips and photographer case studies and will not be submitting to our competitions as much, but with our membership doubling in the past few months that won’t be a problem.
