Challenge Yes or No?

[IamSam]

I would like to make a humble suggestion. If you are selling a house, you advertise to 1,000 people of which 20 turn up on the day of inspection, of which 5 may place an offer. You would not worry about the 2% actual visitors that fructified from 1000 advertising pamphlets and say stats look poor.

If none of the 5 who placed offers decline the purchase, you still have an unsold house. Remember, we are discussing the lack of participation in challenges.

As long as you have a minimum of 2 participants,

Not when it's the same two or three people over and over again.............eventually you grow tired of competing with the same persons. Variety is the spice of life!

We should rather be thinking about the sequence of steps a person would take to become a submitter of competition entries. 1) first visits the forum, 2) seeks to learn PS and starts serving requests 3) watches the contests page - to start with 4) starts liking posts, votes and comments, 5) participates with an entry. Concentration should be on getting 1000 people to visit forum, getting 100 to serve requests with intent to learn and improve, of which 10 may watch the contests page 5 may comment, vote and like of which 2 may submit entries - eventually.

Again we have confusion. This is not the problem. This forum is very active. As I've already pointed out using you as an example. You yourself and many others like you have followed the process you describe above and still do NOT participate in challenges. Also.......

I prepared an entry but felt it was not up to the mark and refrained from submission.

......I don't think that there needs to be any particular order in how one arrives to the point of participating in the challenges. Challenges are not there for the sole purpose of winning (or is it?), they are there to put your work out there, practice and strive to get better. If one can put their work out there and perform free or paid edits no matter the skill level, shouldn't they also be good enough to participate in challenges?

But since you mention it............

2) seeks to learn PS and starts serving requests

This does not happen on our forum and needs to be addressed! Serving requests allows for practice, but does not accommodate learning unless our better members point out problems with edits and offer solutions. The free request forum is a very poor learning environment, there's no proper feedback.

Please understand, I have few issues with the state of the forum, it's doing well. But I share the concerns of others who agree that there's no need to continue the challenges if there's no participation beyond that of the usual suspects. This forum is thriving in other areas of interest. And we should probably take measures of improving that aspect of the forum rather than trying to maintain challenges in which there seems to be little to no interest................for whatever the individual members reasons/excuses might be.