Get the advantage!

I guess that would be me

hmm...you all make really good points. I'm sort of undecided now...It's true what Fempie says, there are a lot of images now, and it was sort of nice to have a new source image come in every day for the seventh day. I don't think anyone will go oooh, cool, look at next month's new source! as much as people did with the seventh one added everyday. Also, this does squash the competition with non-advantage users even more; this is good and bad.
Good part is that it lets people have even more time to chop and make an excellent chop, so all the winning images should be close to brilliant since people will have so much time to work on it and think about it.
Bad part is that non advantage users, unless they possess really great skills, will hardly have a chance of winning anymore. Of course, it's a great thing to have more people to sign up for Advantage, but then for every one person that is willing to do it, there are the ones that just don't feel they would be good enough to make use of it anyway, as well as other reasons.

Of course, if this site was going to be a "pay-to-play" site, that's cool, I'm willing to pay for it, but some people may not have a good experience when they find that they are handicapped this much now.

Like I said, I'm totally neutral on this now, I see the good and bad of either side, and it all depends on what the majority wants, or what JMH wants. Either way will make the site quite a bit different, though.

*ramble complete*

very good words mason...

Giving out a week, a month, or even a year worth or advance warning will not make your work better if you aim for submitting entries to EVERY contest. That still makes you work fast and sloppy. The quality will only improve if you FOCUS on 2-3 contests a week, choosing the ones you feel strongly about your idea/skills/etc. and spending twice the time to make it look good.

The fine print: this is not addressed to anyone in particular in this thread, just random rambling

I got 50 bucks says marco has all thirty day pre-posted by Monday!!!11

I say he has two ready for each day, and raise you 50

What's with the big blank square on the top right when I'm logged off? Is that where ads are supposed to go?

NO OFFENSE to anyone ..BUT IMO...For $2.00 a month...I say $2.00 A MONTH...come on Peeps if you are not getting Advantage its cause ??????...I got it mostly for the higher res pics...What other hobby can you actually win prizes at for that price???

Enter contests one month early

Compete in Mega-Prize contests

Entered in our monthly prize drawing

Upload entries up to 1280x960 / 512KB

Higher resolution source images

Upload and vote on which image we use next

Enhanced members only chat room

Unlimited favorites, Fewer ads

yup, it should be. do you have an ad-blocking thing in place? I have Firefox, and i've installed a couple different extensions that eliminates ads on web pages, very handy...

The contest title and amount of images is in the alt/title tag of each image in the advantage calendar. That is, letting your mouse pointer rest on top of each image, the info will be revealed. I really could not find another place to fit it in. Plus, like you mentioned, the ones starting in a few days are on the home page.

On the subject of seeing new images.... I may be wrong but I think we'll just get a week's worth of new images every Sunday. I don't think a whole month at a time will be revealed will it?

Also I agree that a whole month to work on a chop won't really happen that often unless you plan on skipping a few contests. Even with a week's advantage I'm betting most Advantage users didn't use the entire week to work on that one chop.

Plus I agree that the price for Advantage is far outweighed by the benefits and perks. It'd be nice to be able to buy one month at a shot again though. Maybe charge around $3-5 for a month-by-month Advantage. I know people who spend more than that each week for lottery tickets and/or Starbucks.

I don't disagree with the Advantage concept, and I believe the price is more than fair. But ....

... will the Advantage perks make me a better Photoshop professional?

that's up to you vokaris

Ok, 16 hours later... First excitement allready toned down a bit. Time to think a bit rationally.

Initially I I thought the one month of pictures in advance was pretty neat.. but now.. I'm starting to feel doubtfull about it

Obviously a lot of entries will be submitted many days before (well, I think it's obvious). Taking in consideration that with the oldl 7 days, allready about 20 to 30 chops were submitted, this could mean a lot more chops will be submitted before the contest starts.

Meaning that non advantage members or late advantaged posters will end up pretty far in the entry pages.

For example, I usually submit the day of the contest start. With prize contest I ended up on page 6 or 7. This allready cost me votes due to the fact that some people just don't browse that far (call them lazy). I hate to think what will happen now.. end up on page 15?

You could say: 'well start your chop immediately the moment the image is released'. Well yes I could do that, but I'm someone who makes last minutes changes too (seeing an error or something, or doing a change I think that would benefit my image). And I guess a lot of people do the same.

So basically what I'm saying is 3a days is too much. I feel my advantage will cease to be and advantage due to the huge advantage change... I might as well give up my advantage and do it the way non-advantage users do.. (whee look at the amount of 'advantage' in this paragraph)

Don't want to sound like a nagging sob but this is worrying me a bit ( a lot of bits)

For what it's worth, thumbs up for all the other changes, jmh