Hello everyone. I was thinking about points calculation in article contest. I think most would agree that sometimes these results are not very objective and it doesn't represent true quality of the article. Now most points get those who promote articles outside Dukascopy webpage (including me). I do want this competition to be fair and many interesting articles to be posted. So my proposal of points calculation would be like this:
1. Dukascopy points (the same as now);
2. Views - sum of unique visitors in every article (the same as now). Also plus Facebook likes.
3. Community points. This should replace profile views. And points should be calculated by summing up comments, community likes (not Facebook) and members visits. Members visits also could be the number of visitors whose referral is any Dukascopy webpage. Another possible point calculation feature could be time spent in article page - it should help to filter those who just click from those who actually read.
I think community points would help to show real value of articles at some level.
Just my 0.01 cent.

As long as you get facebook point this contest will never be fair or objective, same goes with member profile, just get all your friend to create one account and you are done.

The only way to make it fair would be to be evaluated only based on Dukascopy points.

We believe, this wouldn't be fair as well. We give a lot of freedom of choice in matters of topic and format of articles, the entry barrier is as low as possible. If the standings would depend solely on the expert opinion, it would be very hard to compare them. Let me use a metaphor: some people like apples more than oranges(still, both are fruit), and vice versa.

At the present moment, we let the public decide what they like most, so that then we can choose from top 20 authors. This makes things easier for us and the final score more transparent for Participants. Imagine for a seconds there were 200 users and imagine the numerous questions like "why you don't like my article"?

The main issue with "letting" the public decide is that it's not the public that decide, there is not enough view on your site alone for this to be the case, it would work if you had tons of views because the spammer wouldnt be able to keep it up.

There is the same issue with popularity point in the 2 other contest where it's currently people with the most people circle commenting (or the most trades with +1) that finish first in popularity and in the case of the strategy contest pretty much first in strategy as long as their strategy didnt work to bad.

I have received plenty of emails from people with link to their article (spamming), some of them are not far from the top the people with most views probably also spam their facebook/twitter account to got points etc... If your happy with this that's fine but dont expect this to reflect the quality of article in any way.

What i feel is Facebook "like" should have lesser value and the comments and discussion from the DFC should have more value when it comes to public decision. The reason is, i am from a country with 1.2 Billion population and getting 1000 facebook likes is just few hours work for me as i have nearly 1000 friends from all accounts.

When we write an article it should be useful or entertaining to those who are interested in that particular field than some one who doesn't know the basics of forex or trading but they sheepishly follow our requests and vote the article which infact doesn't serve our hard work.

In my opinion, Dukascopy points should have 50% weightage and 40% on DFC comments and likes and rest 10% may be Facebook "like"

Expert team certainly knows what is best and their decision is always final and participants mostly accepts their decision except a few...

I have said this already but i think the article contest would be better if there was no prize but people could use it as a blog to explain what their strategies is about or to talk about anything they want.

I might be wrong but i dont see this contest growing, because people will get discouraged very fast by how the points are calculated (and seeing the same people over and over at the top5 ranks), not to mention people running out of ideas ,-)

Pipcity, I think that without prize there would be no articles at all. For example I found several very interesting and useful articles in this contest. These were about things that I never knew about. Also I would never participate in the Trader contest and I think that there are others that would do the same. So I wouldn't have a chance to post an article.
But there's one bad thing about this contest that people will ran out of ideas. I think that Dukascopy should add some article groups. And there should be an analytic group, where traders could write analysis of a single trade. In this case everyone could write many articles each month. And it would be useful as other traders could learn from trades actually made.