The World Open Photography Contest

If you are a regular reader of my blog or follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you probably know about The World Open photography contest that I entered back in early January.  I collaborated with a local model and makeup artist to create The Ice Queen image and paid a fee (not huge – about $16 I think) to enter the contest shortly after the photo shoot.

The idea of the contest was to open up public voting which would then count towards 50% of the final vote – the other 50% would be done by a panel of judges.  The original deadline date was March 31, 2012 and contestants were urged to spread the word through social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and the like.  Myself and the other early contestants were quite diligent in doing just that – so much so that my image was the 2nd favorite of the social media voters.  As the March deadline became closer, the contest officials then changed the deadline date to August 1st.  At the time, I was annoyed, but continued to promote my entry.  As the weeks and months have dragged on, my image dropped among the favorites down to 16th as I had pretty much tapped out all my contacts through social media outlets.  But I continued to try to get new followers to vote for my entry.  So today, as I was getting excited for the final push to get a few more votes before Tuesday’s deadline, I went to the contest site and noticed that the officials have once again extended the deadline – now it’s open through October 31st.  To say I am annoyed is an understatement and I can’t help but question many things:

(1) Do they not have the money needed for the winner(s) and is that why they are extending the deadline over and over again?

(2) Is this actually a scam just to take peoples’ entry fee?

(3) Are they harvesting names/email addresses, etc. with ulterior motives in mind?

(4) Is the contest rigged so that the winner is someone the officials want and they are giving more time for that entrant to collect votes?

(5) Are the contest officials receiving requests to extend the deadline so that a potential contestant can get their entry in?

(6) And why are entrants not getting notified that the deadline has changed?

So this morning, while reviewing my entry status, I noticed my entry had dropped down more and that the deadline was changed, which then prompted me to take a closer look at the contest rules.  I had originally glanced these over before entering just to see what the deadline date was, the image categories, entry fee, etc. but had not really made a mental note of most of the legalese.  So when I got to the bottom of the rules, I noticed #28 which states, “The Organizer reserves the right to make modifications to the Rules/Terms of Service. Changes made to the Rules/Terms will be posted on the website in this section or notification will be sent to users by email. Continued use of the website constitutes acceptance of those changes.”  Great.  🙁  So the officials have given themselves a way to change the contest deadline date basically as often and as long as they would like.  But yet they have failed to send notification by email to the users (meaning people like me and I imagine all registered voters) and apparently that is okay because their Rule #28 says “OR notification will be sent”.  I’ve checked my spam filter too and don’t recall ever getting notification to the terms of the contest.  Regardless, even if they did notify me by email, I would still be pissed off about it. Why even put that in the rules if you are only going to change the rules on that web page and not bother to notify contestants?

After all of this, I’m left with this decision:  (a) pull my entry out of the competition, (b) leave the entry intact, but stop promoting it, or (c) leave the entry intact, but continue to still seek votes.  For now, I’m leaving it and asking for more votes.  But I have to say that I wouldn’t recommend anyone else spend their money to enter their own image(s) into the contest.  For all we know, the contest may never end…they may continue to collect registrant’s contact info and take entry fees without ever intending to finalize the contest and select a winner.

The whole thing just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.