Contests are done in the contest modules. They are very formal, and strict on the rules. It takes me a considerable amount of time to build an official contest - usually a month or more to do all the artwork, coordination, advertising, rules, and wrestling a budget for prizes from the Renderosity Dragon that guards our treasure hoard.

Challenges, on the other hand, are done in the forums. They are less formal, and less strict on the rules. They don't require nearly as much time to create, can be impromptu, and though there are semi-formal challenges created by Renderosity and Moderated by Renderosity in the Challenge Forum, they can be created in any forum by any member, and moderated by the member creating the challenge. We get occasional challenges of this nature throughout the year. The only time the Mods would interfere is if a TOS occurs.

If you want to create a challenge, you can even notify a Mod for assistance in pinning your challenge to the top of the forum, or removing inappropriate comments.

To make a long story short, they are two different beasts.

The only exception to the ease of doing a Challenge would be when I put a mega-challenge in place, like the Summer Carnival. That beast took two months to prepare and wrestle to the ground. Trivia fact: When I was creating the backdrop for the marble counting game, well... I'm no engineer and the bricks collapsed, crushing the original jars. I'm still finding marbles on the back porch.

P.S. We can't merge threads, we can only move threads. Every thread has a unique id. This thread is 2990486. Merging a thread would be a nightmare, it would mess up the perma-link (used for the newsletter and advertising), and create a bunch of broken links. This happens when we copy-paste a thread instead of moving it.

P.S.S. On the flip side of all that, yes, we need to be more careful with contest announcement announcements - those are often our weak point when something changes and I can't find all the announcements to make the change. The reason there are often so many announcements is that people turn off all the forums they aren't interested in, and never see any announcement, and then later ask me why I didn't announce the contest or challenge. Which means, I have to post the announcement all over the place to reach everyone.

It's a big beast to wrestle with.

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Wolfenshire, Moderator/Community Leader