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Judges

There will be a few people besides the X-Day Manager who have extra privileges; these people are called 'Judges'. While there were Judges in previous years, the role that they play is different this year:

• Judges will help the X-Day Manager in reviewing submissions as they are entered, to ensure that they have acceptable content, that they are properly marked for 'adult' content if applicable, and that they are assigned to the correct sub-categories. When submissions are first entered, they go on a queue and are not listed on the site right away; it is the Judges who move entries from the queue so they display on the site.
• If there is a dispute raised by an X-Day participant, such as for where anyone's work is categorized, the Judges may help to resolve it.
• Judges may also help to resolve suspected cases of cheating, such as by providing multiple opinions on whether that is the case.
• Judges may have a role to play during the voting period, but it will not be like in 2002 where they provided a second vote out of the top popular vote results; any voting period involvement this year will be different.

Note that the identity of the judges is protected; only themselves and the X-Day manager should know who they are. This is done partly to prevent outside influences. While Judges can and do compete in X-Day themselves, they are not allowed to approve their own entries, or resolve disputes brought against them as contestants.

Submission Evaluation Guidelines

This section shows some of the procedural guidelines that X-Day Judges should follow when evaluating each new submission and determining whether it is suitable (in its current form) to be listed to the public on the X-Day website.

Each judge may change the listing status (to 'approved' or 'rejected') of any submission save one of their own; they may change the type-based sub-category of any submission. They may do these things at any time and in any order, as early as when the submission is entered, and as late as when the submissions period ends. Multiple judges may do something to the same submission. The participant who submitted an entry will receive a notification by email whenever a judge does something with the submission, and they can also see any changes when they are logged in to the website. If a judge rejects an entry, they must give a reason why, and the submitter then has a chance to fix or contest the problem, and have the submission re-evaluated for listing. A judge may not change any other details of a submission themselves, although they can optionally reject it for listing until the submitter changes them.

Generally speaking, each X-Day participant will have the greatest degree of freedom possible in describing their submissions. The judges will mainly just enforce a minimum set of rules or guidelines, or prevent blatant infractions. Of course, in the end they should still do what they think is best, or talk to the X-Day Manager if they have questions. These are the main things that judges should look for when deciding to approve or reject a submission (and note that they can still reject a submission after it was approved, or vice versa):

• Does every provided url go to the described submission, and not something else, or is it a broken link? If any links are broken, reject the entry citing this.
• Does the submission include adequate content warnings considering what the judge can see in the actual submission? If warnings are wholly inadequate, and not just borderline, then reject the entry citing this.
• If this submission is entered as a web site, then does that web site display, on its main page or main links page, a clearly visible graphic logo or text hyperlink that goes to the front page of the X-Day 2003 website (the judge should test the link)? If it doesn't, then reject the entry citing this.
• If the details provided for the submission don't adequately credit the creators of the submission, if the submitter had any help, then reject the entry citing this.
• Reject the submission if the submitter had no hand in creating it, and they are therefore submitting someone elses' work.
• Photo manipulation style entries should have both before and after pictures that appear together, so it is easy to see how much the submitter changed. However, if the description provided for a submission says that the original can not be found, then the judge can still approve the entry.
• Do not reject a submission just because the someone doesn't like the person who made it or because anyone has complained about their behaviour or sportsmanship in the past; judge only the submission, and not the creator.
• Do not reject a submission because someone thinks the person is submitting too many entries. The Submissions Manager forms should prevent this.
• Do not reject a submission because it is in the wrong subcategory; that can be fixed independantly.
• Do not reject a web site submission because parts of it are broken, either in your web browser or for anyone. Judging is not to evaluate the quality of a work, and there is not a minimum quality requirement for being listed (what the judge is evaluating). If a site's content is broken, that can show up in the popular voting/rating process later. A broken site is only a concern to a judge in so much that it prevents the judge from rating the content warnings.
• Note that the judge must be able to explain in under 250 characters why they are rejecting an entry; do not reject an entry unless it can be justified; where possible, the explanation should also spell out what needs to be changed.
• Finally, the judge should use their best judgement. I can not anticipate all the things that should be considered when judging an entry. Likewise, if a judge feels that they can not make a decision, then they can stop evaluating the entry without making any changes to its status.

Don't forget that rejections are not permanent. A participant can take a rejected entry and ask for it to be re-evaluated by a judge, usually after making appropriate changes to the entry or its descriptive details.

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Site last updated 2004 June 11.