Ahoy! Avast! YoHo! Today my subscription ended, which has lead me to finally writing my first journal on dA (after being a member for almost 3 years )... Why, you ask? Well, i'll tell you...

Usually, most people would start to write journals before or during the purchase of a subscription, but mine has recently ended and i can not warrent the cost of renewing seeing as i only really use dA for the chat channels where i help out/idle in a few fairly popular places. For those of you who haven't already seen me loitering around on dAmn, i've been bouncing around ideas off my good friends in #WebDevelopment about setting up a contest of some variety for programming related endeavours, possibly every month (no prizes currently, however. - subscriptions/css journals/critique maybe?)

I'm still mulling over some ideas and will write up another journal when i've finalised all the details of the contest, but meanwhile, perhaps you have something you'd like to see taken into consideration? Below is a rough list of the current ideas we've been running though, more on this later!

• Contest submissions can be in any language, so long as it works and can be demostrated with ease.


• Submissions will be accepted for work from individuals only with the exception of team based or "event specific" contests.


• All contests will span 1 month entirely (start/end date to be confirmed) where the contest ends on the date it started in the previous month, ie: start: 14th July, end: 14th Aug.


• Submissions can be limited by multiple factors:
  
  
  
  • Total number of lines per file/files (ignoring comments)
  
  
  • Total file size per file/files
  
  
  • Limited resources, ie: only allowed to use supplied/selected language specific functions
  
  
  • Use of supplied data, ie: parsing the provided xml file or database
  
  


• The first contest held will aim to familiarise everyone with the event. This will be a loosey based "create something cool" contest, most likely within a (reasonable) maximum file size or line count restriction.


• One annual contest where teams of 2 (or more) individuals work together on a single entry, each individual working to write inter-operable functions/modules with an agreed structure, but no knowledge of each others code.


• Contests to be judged by each individual entrant, with the exception of voting on their own entry (voting system coming soon)

If you have anything you'd like to add, feel free to chip in and i will look forward to seeing all of your submissions when the contest kicks off! This is just a rough working list so far, try not to fret if you think we've missed something fundamental, more will be added over the coming days/weeks - here's hoping it'll be a good one! If anyone has any ideas or would like to donate prizes (no matter how big or small), please feel free to note me or contact me on dAmn Thanks for reading and good luck with your entries in the upcoming contests!