Better competition rules

I've been staying clear of the SDXL competition until now. Reading the rules, I do not feel encouraged at all to participate.

Here are the changes I would like to see:

Real competitions would mean every user submitting ONE image before a deadline.

No prior public posting of the image is permitted.

The aspect ratio of ALL submitted images MUST be the same within the competition.

Otherwise, Steve's image at 1024x1536 ratio will be 33% more visible in the lineup then Sally's image at 1024x1024.

All submitted images must be reproducable with the information provided.

A user is expected to submit correct metadata, config file , embeddings, extensions and extra networks to create the image.

This requirement will discourage users from running inpaint endlessly or outright cheating either by using photoshop or by "stealing" the image from someone else (as a straight-up copy paste, via partial img2img or via cross-attention layer injection or a combination of all three)

The demand for reproducability will also discourage spam. The provided workflows will provide value to the community once the competition is over.

And it will provide transparancy to the competition. Nobody will think the winning image on the podium is a convoluted photoshop or a Midjourney generation if they can re-create the same image on their own device.

Once all submissions have been gathered, moderators perform the initial selection by filtering out images that are against competition rules, or are below quality requirements.

After the selection is complete, you post ALL the contributions at once and let users place a vote for the image they like best.

(Keep in mind , letting users place a single vote is a simplification. There is a better way to do this. See disclaimer)

The voting ratios should NOT be publicly visible. The order of the images should be random.

Votes may only come from accounts that are X days old , have posted Y images/models and which has received Z reactions in total.

After a given deadline, the polling is closed. Top 200 images are each given a point 200 to 1.

Then you gather the judges and let them rate the top images. Top 200 images from the judge selection is given a point 200 to 1.

Then you add the scores using a predetermined ratio. Points from community rankings can be 2/3 of the score and points from judges rankings can be 1/3 of the score.

So if an image is on place 83 on the community rankings and place 45 in the judge rankings then its score will be (201 - 83)*(2/3) + (201 - 45) * (1/3) = 131 points

Judges should give clear motivations for their ranking. The reason why the judges should have a portion of the final score is to give some leverage to images that are technically impressive which the community votes tend to "forget".

Example of this would be a vivid landscape photo posted next to a cheap photo of woman with big breasts.

Final ranking will be the top 200 images with the highest points.

This would be a more "fair" system in my opinion.

Disclaimer:

For the sake of simplicity, I am providing an example to how the contest should work with each user being allowed only one vote.

This one-vote system is actually not that good.

I would prefer that users are allowed to place 10 votes (or more) on the competition images, using a so-called "positional voting system".

Example would be the system used by Eurovision song Contest: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_at_the_Eurovision_Song_Contest