[quote=@Garjel_blah]
There was oe thing I was a bit hesitant about when I read the outline of how this would work... You said you wanted people to read every entry before voting.
But what if there are like heaps of entries? Or what if they're all thousands of words long each? What if there are heaps of thousand word long entries?
Not many people would have the time for that, I'd have thought. Even over a month. Or do you disagree?
[/quote]

My personal attitude is, you should feel free to talk about entries whenever you want. Just read the first one? Like it? Talk it up! When it comes to VOTING, though, everyone should have a fair chance to get your vote... and frankly, if you as a voter think "I don't like long entries, and I'm never reading all of that," [b]that's fine by me[/b]. You're the voter, right? Vote on whatever parameters you want. Then again as a writer, I'd hate to pour all that effort into something and get zero attention. So like... idunno. I don't wanna make a policy that [i]encourages[/i] people to skip submissions, but I also don't want to whip the readers. It's a tightrope.

[quote]What if we classified the pieces by length? Maybe have different word number classes, each with their own individual vote. After voting was done, perhaps the winners (top two, top three, whatever) from each length class could be put up for the finals and the winner decided out of them.[/quote]

Back in the days of OldGuild, we had Writer of the Month (and I'm really hoping they come back and set up shop here, too). WOTM was split up into length-based categories, and it worked just fine. That said, the crew that I put together to start up RPGC (who I'm gonna go credit, right as soon as I'm done with this reply) wasn't really attached. The thinking was, if gigantic stories start getting ignored and that becomes a problem, *then* we'll address it -- either by setting up word-limits in each contest, or by breaking up entries into different categories. The general idea behind RPGC is to keep everything super-flexible. 

Sidenote -- there will be 'staff picks' for each contest, where everyone who worked on that particular month goes through and we pick a few notable stories. Staff doesn't get to skip long stories -- so at the very least, if you submit something super-long, you'll have our attention, and you'll get some critiques for your efforts. But when it's at all possible, I want to leave things up to the common vote and the writers -- if the vote favors shorter entries, and you want to win, maybe try something shorter. That anarchy is something I like. But again -- I don't think of it as my role to dictate this kind of thing. If the staff for a given contest wants to do things differently, that's their prerogative.